RENEWABLE ENERGY
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Definition of electricity sources and "renewable" energy
The hidden cost of intermittency
Total supply and total demand mask the hourly reality
A limit on total production from wind and solar
Drivers of integrated cost of electricity
Fossil fuels and hydropower to compensate for intermittency
Thought experiments on infinite and free renewable energy
Other renewable energy sources
- Introduction
The Western world has set itself the goal of achieving carbon neutrality, or net zero emissions, by 2050. This involves a shift or transition from fossil fuels to so-called "renewable" energy sources. This is an extremely ambitious project, some call it the greatest challenge facing humanity, driven by climate change and the continuing rise in temperature and its disastrous consequences, which we must avoid at all costs if the planet is to remain a viable place for us to live.
We have already seen that 80% of all energy comes from fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels is quite inefficient: About 2/3 of the energy content is lost as unwanted or dissipated heat waste when we burn fossil fuels, so the final usable energy we have for our machines and systems is only 1/3 of the primary energy contained in the fossil fuels. This law of 2/3 loss applies to anything you burn to convert heat into mechanical power, to oil, gas and coal - to every country, to every decade of the last century. Nobody can escape this inadequacy.
So, naturally, the popular belief is that by using 'renewable' energy like solar, wind and batteries, we'll be more efficient and won't need as much primary energy in the first place.
Many believe that if all sources were electric, we would need a third less of the energy we currently use, because we could eliminate the 70% of wasted thermal energy from fossil fuels. We would have less waste, more efficiency and cheaper energy. This is a fairy tale that we would like to be true, but is not feasible in reality.
- Definition of electricity sources and "renewable" energy
There are three types of energy source:
1. Baseload: It produces a constant output 24/7 and is not really suited to increasing or decreasing production. Typically nuclear energy.
2. Dispatchable energy sources can be turned up or down quickly to match instant demand. These are typically gas-fired power plants or hydropower.
3. Intermittent: produces energy at random and at the capacity determined by Mother Nature, typically solar and wind.
Batteries are not a source of energy, but a storage medium. They are only suitable for storing energy for about 4 hours, not for a week or a season. Batteries need to be recharged, so they cannot be a baseload source either. At a small scale, batteries act as dispatchable, which is important for smoothing the peaks and lows of intermittent sources, but they are unable to produce at the same volume as baseload or dispatchable sources. This is because, in order to use batteries as a dispatchable source, the grid (wind, solar and battery) would need to be overbuilt by a factor of 10x or more in order to cover the 'Dunkelflaute', or prolonged periods of no wind and very little sunlight.
You can have a grid based on baseload and dispatchable sources, or a grid made up of intermittent and dispatchable sources. However, it is technically impossible to have a grid consisting of only intermittent sources, or of intermittent and baseload sources only. Without dispatchable sources, the grid cannot match instant demand or maintain a perfect 50 Hz frequency, leading to grid instability and a high risk of blackouts. Once a certain threshold of intermittent sources is reached on the grid, it becomes very expensive for the end user and unstable, prone to blackouts. The maximum level of intermittency on a grid depends on location and sun and wind conditions, but is usually 30–50%.
Let's agree on the term "renewable energy". It is a source of energy that will still be available in 1000 years' time if there is no human intervention.
We can probably bet that in 1000 years the sun will still be shining, the wind will still be blowing, the centre of the earth will still be warmer than the surface, and all the rainwater will still be flowing down rivers to the oceans. That's why we think of solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric energy as "renewable".
On the contrary, oil and gas fields, which took 50 to 250 million years to form, and coal, which took about 300 million years to form, are not renewable in our time scale: No new fossil fuel will be formed within 1000 years, regardless of the rate of human consumption. That's why the 3 fossil fuels are non-renewable energy sources.
But there is a big misunderstanding or shortcut we make in this biased definition:
While wind, sunshine and rivers are renewables, solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams are not. To get the equipment to capture renewable energy, you need to extract a lot of raw material from the ground, process and refine it using chemicals, water and very high temperatures, which are energy-intensive activities. You also have to transport and assemble these materials. At the end you get a device that has a limited lifespan, 20 to 30 years for solar panels, 20 years for windmills and 80 years for hydroelectric dams. These technologies are not renewable in the sense that you need non-renewable sources of energy to make them in the first place. Although all the raw materials are abundant in the accessible crust of the earth, some are not easily accessible, some are under the ocean or under the Antarctic, some are in very low concentration, or some are mainly in a few countries, and this also means that the raw materials are not infinitely "renewable" or abundant forever. Recycling is not the answer, and I will go into this in more detail in the "Materials and Mining" chapter.
- Aiming a 100% renewable world
If you look at the chart below in Figure 1A and extrapolate the trend, you might be tempted to think that "renewable" energy will be a huge part of the world's electricity supply by 2030 and definitely 100% of electricity supply by 2050.
Figure 1A: World installed capacity of renewable energy since 2010While this chart is great news, it gives the false impression that the 2050 net-zero goal is achievable. In fact, there are several barriers to a net zero strategy in 2050.
Firstly, electricity is only 20% of the total energy consumed, so these charts only address 1/5th of the problem.
In addition, as shown in the "Dependency on Fossil Fuels" chapter, fossil fuel consumption is growing faster than renewable energy. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that it takes a huge amount of fossil fuel energy to manufacture these renewable devices. Every installed solar/wind farm or ESS battery is only possible by building them in the first place, which includes raw materials that require fossil fuels to produce. Another reason is the intermittency of this energy, so that a back-up system, mainly gas and coal, has to be installed on the grid to cover this shortfall.
China is at the forefront of 'renewable' energy, as the largest country in terms of installed capacity of solar, wind, electric batteries and electric vehicles, while also dominating the supply chain of raw materials. At the same time, however, China is increasing its coal consumption enormously and is by far the largest consumer of coal. These new "renewable" energy sources require a lot of materials that need industrial heat to be manufactured (coal) and need a dispatchable source of electricity when solar and wind are not producing. China is also the world's factory, processing raw materials for the entire planet and the ideal outsourcing location for most of the world's heavy energy (dirty?) industries.
See below in Figures 1B and 1C the exponential growth of China's renewable energy installations.
Figure 1C: China leads in the electrical demand VS Europe and USA
The narrative of the exponential growth of 'renewable energy', particularly in China, is both accurate and misleading. Yes, the installed capacity of solar power, wind power, grid battery storage and electric vehicles (EVs) is growing every year. Together, solar and wind accounted for more than 20% of total chinese electricity production in 2025, as shown in Figure 1D below. This figure will certainly increase to 40% or 50% in the coming decade, which is a positive development as it will displace coal consumption for electricity production. However, I doubt China or any other country in the world will be able to cover more than 50% of its electricity consumption with wind and solar power alone by 2040 and beyond due to the intermittent nature of these energy sources.
Figure 1D: Share of wind and solar in chinese electricity
Solar and wind are growing fast, but if you compare it to total energy consumption, coal is still the dominant source of primary energy because of industrial heat applications, while wind+solar still accounts for less than 10% of total energy consumption in China in 2024, as shown in Figure 1E below:
Figure 1E: Chinese energy production and consumption in 2024
China installs more solar and wind capacity each year than the rest of the world combined, yet it accounts for only 8% of its total energy consumption and only about 20% of its electricity production, as of 2024. That's because while wind and solar are growing rapidly in relative terms year on year, coal is growing even faster in absolute terms in terms of GWh consumed.
China invested in the technologies associated with electrification 2 decades ago. China now has a majority market share in raw material processing (Figure 2A below), electrification technologies such as solar, wind, batteries, EVs (Figure 2B below), and a full grip on the solar panel manufacturing supply chain (Figure 2C below).
Figure 2C: China has a full grip on the photovoltaic supply chain
For any country or region other than China, the move to greater electrification means greater reliance and dependence on China for the entire manufacturing supply chain, and indirectly on gas and coal for electricity generation during the intermittency of solar and wind. The narrative of "energy independence and sovereignty" proclaimed by Europe for its 2050 net-zero target is a big lie, as it makes Europe totally dependent on China, and on the US, Qatar and Russia for gas imports.
China, together with the US, is the biggest carbon emitter and China is by far the biggest coal consumer. To say that China is the bad cop and the scapegoat is really out of touch with reality and completely hypocritical and petty: China makes all our laptops, our steel, our copper, refines most of the raw materials that we, the Western world, need to live a decent and comfortable life. We have moved our industries to China to let them pollute on our behalf. China pollutes for our benefit and for our needs in the rest of the world. Anyone, especially Western media, who paints China as the bad student and blames China for climate change is simply wrong and misinformed. It would be like telling a black African to go and wash his dirty skin, not knowing that his skin is dark because of natural pigmentation and not because of dirt. It is utterly ridiculous.
Another big unspoken issue in the mainstream media: The lifespan issue is also a harsh reality: all our efforts of the last 20 years on wind and solar installed capacity from 2024 onwards will contribute zero in 2050, because by then all the equipment installed so far will have to be replaced by a new one. Nothing is meant to last forever.
Coal- and gas-fired power stations, coal- and gas-fired furnaces, nuclear power stations and hydroelectric dams tend to have a much longer life span of 40 to 80 years, which makes the cost of these devices cheaper than solar panels or wind turbines if you amortise them over their real life span.
If you count the cost of materials per unit of energy produced, a hydro plant is 3 times cheaper than a windmill or solar panel, and its lifespan is probably 4 times longer, which means that hydro is a factor of 12 cheaper than solar and wind over its entire lifespan, and it can produce electricity 24/7. Speaking of 24/7, that's the big elephant in the room.
- Capacity factor
The capacity factor is the average output of a device over a year divided by the maximum output of the device if it were producing at full capacity 24/7/365. The reason for this low capacity factor is that the sun doesn't always shine in perfect, cloudless conditions at the highest angle of refraction in summer, and the wind doesn't always blow at 25 knots without gusts.
Solar panels have a capacity factor of around 10% to 20%, depending on location, and wind turbines between 20% and 30% for onshore and 30% to 50% for offshore.
If a rated 200W solar panel produces 200W of energy at noon in summer, under the best sunshine conditions, it will produce 130W at noon in winter, 50W at sunrise and sunset in the morning and evening, and 0W at night, half the time, so the average power output of a 200W solar panel over the year is only about 40W.
The capacity factor of a solar panel in Germany is around 12%, but around 20% on the Canary Islands, where the sun shines almost every day and there is little difference in daylight between summer and winter. It makes much more sense to install solar panels on these islands than in northern Germany.
This makes claims such as "We installed 500GW of solar last year" far from the reality of an actual power output of about 70GW on average. And that 70GW was not produced at the exact time when demand was there, it was an average, which means that at some times solar panels are not producing enough and at other times solar panels are producing too much and putting the grid at risk.
Figure 3A below shows the average capacity factor of different electrical energy sources in the USA in 2020.
Figure 3A: Average capacity factor in the USA in 2020
Nuclear power stations have the best capacity factor because, apart from a couple of days each year when the fuel rods are replaced, they run at full capacity 24/7 as baseload power. At the other end of the spectrum is solar power, which has a capacity factor of 25% due to night-time. This means that a 100 MW nuclear power station will produce 2,150 MWh of energy in one day (100 x 24 x 0.9), whereas a 100 MW solar farm will only produce 600 MWh in one day (100 x 24 x 0.25). That's a significant difference. Renewable advocates will always talk about installed capacity in Watts, but what we need to consider is energy output in Watt-hour or Wh.
One might guess that if we install 3.5 times more solar capacity than nuclear, it will produce a similar output. This is a false assumption. This is because solar power is only produced in the middle of the day. Multiplying the installed capacity only increases the energy output during the middle of the day and not during peak demand hours in the evening and early morning. Increasing solar capacity would only generate excess capacity during the day and would never meet evening demand after sunset. This is due to the intermittent nature of renewable energies such as solar and wind.
- The hidden cost of intermittency
Electricity is a flow of electrons. At all times, every second, the supply has to match the demand, otherwise you have a blackout. Supply has to go up and down at the exact pace of demand, which is usually peak from 7am to 8am and in the evening from 5pm to 8pm, and relatively low at night.
This is something we take for granted in our society, which is not the case in every country in the world: Electricity is available around the clock when I need it.
Our society has become very productive and comfortable because the power grid was built around fossil fuel generation that could be turned up and down to meet just-in-time demand.
Now imagine a world full of solar panels and windmills. Would it be OK not to have breakfast, or not to have the lights on and watch TV in the evening, because unfortunately the wind is not blowing today? Would it be OK if factories that operate in 2 or 3 shifts models only opened from 9am to 4pm in winter because the sun doesn't shine the rest of the time?
No, it is absolutely inconceivable to live in such a society without a serious drop in productivity and living standards.
That's because electricity is a service, not a commodity. It is produced whenever you need it, at any time of the day or year. It should be available 24/7, whenever you need it, like doctors in the first emergency room.
Western media advertise that wind and solar power are now the cheapest source of electricity when the levelized cost of energy is taken into account. Levelized cost is a comprehensive measure that includes the cost of manufacturing the device or power plant, the cost of installing it on the grid, the cost of operating it, the cost of maintaining it over its lifetime, and the cost of dismantling it at the end of its lifetime.
Over the last decade, solar and wind have indeed become the cheapest form of electricity, as shown in Figure 4A below. As shown in Figure 4B below, the cost of a kWh produced by 'renewable' sources is now as cheap as that produced by gas combined cycle power plants, and cheaper than that produced by gas peaking power plants, new nuclear power plants, and new coal-fired power plants.
Figure 4A: Evolution of the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) by source
Even when including battery storage with solar modules, the cost of solar power and three hours of battery storage has halved between 2019 and 2025, as shown in Figure 4C below. This is due to technological progress and advances in these technologies, as well as the overcapacity of Chinese manufacturing, which has flooded the market and pushed prices down.
Figure 4C: The price of solar and battery storage is falling fast
What is missing from the discussion is that when the wind is blowing and/or the sun is shining, yes, solar and wind produce cheap electricity. But our society runs on the 24/7 availability of electricity. If we depended on natural conditions to work or cook, society would be much less productive and our standard of living much lower than in our 24/7 world. If you include the cost of storing "renewables" to compensate for intermittency, firstly you can't do it at scale for an entire grid for more than 2 hours, and secondly you would have a massive increase in the announced levelized cost.
The reality is that whatever installed capacity of solar and wind you have on a grid, even if you had 100 times that capacity, you would still need to keep your other dispatchable sources, such as hydro, coal and gas, at a level so that all the peak load can be absorbed by those other dispatchable sources. The more "renewables" you have on the grid, the more it pushes the gas and coal plants from 24/7 base load to 4 hour a day reserve peak load units, and so it makes the electricity coming from those peak load sources really expensive, because of the solar and wind. Overall, the price gain you get when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing has to be long enough to compensate for the high price during that peak period when the "renewables" sources are not producing. And that is why solar makes sense in sparsely populated, sparsely industrialised regions close to the equator with very little difference between winter and summer, such as the Canary Islands, and makes no sense at all in Norway or Canada. The same goes for wind power, which makes sense in Denmark, the English Channel or Gibraltar, but not in northern Italy or Bavaria.
While solar and wind power may be the cheapest source of electricity for producers and utilities, this is not necessarily the case for end consumers who pay for the entire production, transport and distribution process, including the induced costs of storage, grid stability and management. This is a form of propaganda regarding the low LCOE cost of solar energy. Figure 4D below shows the claimed low cost of solar on the left, but shows on the right the real cost of solar energy for the end consumer.
Figure 4D: Real cost of solar electricity
The scale on Figure 4D above is irrelevant, but the message is clear: if we take into account the battery storage and the additional solar capacity required to charge the battery during the day, as well as the grid, service and administrative costs, the price of solar electricity becomes much higher.
To develop a more comprehensive, full-cycle metric, researchers from the EPSA (Electrical Power Supply Association) considered the effective load-carrying capability (ELCC) of each resource — a key measure of reliability — to estimate the cost of resource adequacy. ELCC determines the percentage of a resource’s nameplate capacity that could be contributed towards reliability at any given time if the grid required it. The analysis then assessed the additional investments in backup sources needed for the resource to reach its full installed capacity. As shown by the light blue bars in figure 4E below, the cost of resource adequacy differs for each resource. These costs are often higher for renewable resources due to their intermittency — wind and solar energy are weather-dependent and therefore unavailable when required by the grid. Taking these costs into account, integrating these resources alongside sufficient backups leads to costs roughly double those of traditional LCOE estimates represented by the dark blue bars.
Figure 4E: Effective load-carrying LCOE of each source
Everyone claims that solar power is the cheapest form of electricity. Well, that is definitely true for producers, but not at all for consumers. If a producer is paid a fixed price per kWh produced — as is the case on the spot market or with a long-term volume contract — then, yes, of course utilities will favour solar because panels are extremely cheap to buy and quick to install, and huge profits can be made on kWh sold. However, consumers want electricity 24/7 and pay the average production price, plus grid and distribution costs. When a solar park is added to the grid, additional grid connections and inverters are needed, as well as a huge distribution line from the park to the consumer. You also need a backup dispatchable source to cover the intermittency of solar, which is expensive because the back-up source is idle most of the time and produces energy sporadically during peak hours only. The total cost to consumers rises as the share of intermittent renewables on the grid grows. Make no mistake: Solar and wind energy are deployed because they are the most profitable sources for corporations, either through selling electricity or receiving state subsidies. However, the more solar and wind energy that is installed, the higher the bill for the end consumer when you consider total cost of the grid.
The electricity grid
The reason why "renewables" will never be the main source of energy is because you need to add long-term storage to the system, and you really need to factor in the additional costs associated with intermittency compared to other sources: The levelized cost of wind and solar has to include other sources such as gas and coal power plants to cover intermittency, ESS (energy stationary storage) batteries, a more complex grid due to distributed generation sites, a smart grid to operate this complex system, and massive land use.
Figure 5A: The electricity grid is getting more complex
The advertised extremely low price per unit of energy claimed for solar panels and windmills does not take these additional costs into account. Solar panels have an efficiency (capacity factor) of 10% to 25% and wind turbines between 30 and 40%. This means that for a solar panel capable of producing 100kW, because the sun is not always shining, the panel will only produce an average of 20kW.
The intermittency of solar and wind energy means that there are consecutive days without wind, and these days have minimal sunlight with early afternoon sunset, leading to extended periods of no electricity generation, which have to be covered by fossil energy sources because electric batteries only last 4 to 6 hours to fully discharged. This is the so-called "dark period" or "Dunkelflaute", long periods in winter when reliable dispatchable sources are needed to cover peak demand, such as gas, coal, hydro or nuclear. That's why an all-renewable grid is impossible in densely populated areas (high demand), not blessed with mountains (hydropower) and far from the equator (long winter nights), such as Germany or the UK.
See Figures 6A and 6B below for an example of "Dunkelflaute" in Germany on December 12th 2024, a time of no sunshine and no wind blowing, when electricity prices rose tenfold to 120 EUR/MWh in the evening, driving up electricity prices across northern Europe due to the interconnections between countries.
Figure 6B: "Dunkelflaute" in Germany on December 9th to 11th of 2024
As you can see from Figures 6A and 6B above, solar energy production in Germany in winter is insignificant on most days, and when the wind was not blowing for 2 days, on a cold winter weekday during peak demand in the morning and evening, even with all the gas and coal-fired power stations running at full steam, there was still a significant gap between supply and demand that had to be covered by imports. To avoid a blackout, Germany was prepared to pay any price to absorb its neighbours' electricity production: French nuclear and hydroelectric power, Norwegian hydroelectric power and Polish coal-fired power plants, creating a price spark also in these three neighbouring countries, even though the grid in these neighbouring countries has very few renewable sources. Poland, France and Norway are basically paying the price to avoid a northern Europe blackout, due to Germany's energy strategy of having maximum wind and solar power.
See also below in Figure 6C an example of electricity generation in the UK, where even in summer with long sunny days, there are extended periods when wind + solar + nuclear cannot meet electricity demand, which requires imports from neighbouring countries, while forcing exports during windy days.
Figure 6C: Solar, wind and Nuclear do not meet demand in UK in July 2024
The advantage of solar panels and wind turbines is that they reduce the fuel consumption of the other energy source used as the base load. If a country generates a large proportion of its electricity from nuclear power (like France) or hydroelectric dams (like Norway), there is little point in installing solar and wind power. But if most of the energy production comes from coal or gas power plants, like in Poland or Germany, then solar and wind make some sense because they reduce the consumption of coal and gas for a certain period of time.
Solar and wind do not reduce the total installed capacity of baseload power plants that you need. That's because at peak times, when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you need the baseload system to meet all your needs. The baseload system must be sized to absorb 100% of the peak demand, otherwise you would have a blackout. The baseload system is any source that you can reliably have all day: gas and coal-fired power stations, nuclear power, hydroelectric dams, biogas plants, battery storage, etc. Dispatchable sources are sources that you can turn on and off at will to match the ups and downs of demand: gas and coal-fired power stations, hydroelectric dams, battery storage, etc.
During winter peak hours between 6pm and 9pm, when the wind is not blowing, countries with a high proportion of solar and wind are heavily dependent on imports from neighbouring baseload sources. Germany, for example, relies on French nuclear, Norwegian hydro and Polish coal during the no-wind, no-sun periods, which drives up the hourly price and also makes coal-fired and gas-fired power stations irreplaceable: They have to be on the grid, ready to supply electricity. You cannot get rid of these dispatchable sources.
There is a limit to the share of renewables in the electricity mix: Renewables look good when they're a small part of the grid and gaps go unnoticed. But as their share grows, the costs of back-up power and load balancing quickly add up.
The rise of AI and data centres exposes the renewable illusion. These power-hungry technologies are rewriting the energy story, ending 20 years of flat demand in the US and Europe. Renewables aren't even on the playing field: AI and data centres need constant, reliable power. Wind and solar, with their intermittency, just don't cut it. Downtime isn't an option for data center who runs 24/7.
Arguing about the cost of renewables is a waste of time. Comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels is like comparing a bicycle to a car. A bike is cheaper, but it's useless for long journeys or heavy loads. A car costs more but gets the job done. Energy works the same way. Cost alone doesn't tell the story. Nobody wants a blackout. It is good that renewables are part of the mix, but they have their limits.
As a result, by 2022, 60% of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuel power plants. Wind and solar only 12% globally. We are very far from a fully "renewable" electricity production.... And I am only talking about electricity, all other non-electric industrial applications are obviously based on fossil fuels. Wind and solar accounts for only 4% of the total world energy consumed.
As demand for electricity is expected to grow enormously over the coming decades, baseload power stations will have to grow too, no matter how many solar panels and windmills we install. Unless we find a long-term storage solution, we will not get rid of fossil fuels in electricity generation.
- Total supply and total demand mask the hourly reality
As you probably know, we recommend drinking 2 litres of water a day as a healthy habit. Let's play a little imaginary scenario:
Imagine you had access to 3 litres of water at night between 1am and 4am, but no access to water for the remaining 21 hours of the day. How would you feel? Pretty annoyed, right? That's because even if 3 litres a day is more than enough on average, the spread of availability over the day is not at all convenient for your daily routines, such as sleeping at night. That's what solar panels, and to a lesser extent windmills, are: A cheap, abundant source of energy that doesn't produce when you need it most.
The intermittency issue with solar and wind is mainly misunderstood in terms of total capacity and grid dimensioning. Let's say a country like Germany consumes 15GWh. It would be a false assumption to say that if there is 15GWh of solar and wind capacity, all the demand will be met. That would be a false statement, because it does not take into account that at any moment of peak demand, the supply has to be equal to that peak demand, and so at that particular moment you need a non-intermittent source to be ready to supply up to the peak demand. In other words, even if the total installed capacity of "renewable" sources can meet the peak demand, you also need another baseload source of sufficient capacity to meet the peak demand. Basically, you need to double the installed capacity of your grid compared to the demand. Let's visualise this statement in hourly charts from 2 different areas: Germany and California.
Take a look at California's electricity production on a random winter and summer day in Figure 7A below.
A few things to note about these charts above:
First, the big picture for the US as a country. It relies on about 40% gas, 20% nuclear, 20% coal and 20% renewables (solar, wind, battery and hydro) for electricity. California is one of the best pupils in the country in terms of installed 'renewables'. That's why this case is so compelling, because it's supposed to be the best-case scenario.
While renewables, mainly solar, look excellent in June due to the long daylight hours, they look much less potent in January, both in terms of reduced duration, 8am to 4pm only in January compared to 7am to 7pm in June, and reduced output, around 11GW in January compared to 20GW in June.
On January 15th at 6pm there was a peak supply of 17GW from gas plants. On 4th June during a short period in the evening the peak gas demand was 10GW but the rest of the day it was almost 0GW. You really need to have 17GW of installed capacity to meet peak winter demand, which means you have a huge amount of gas plants that are idle most of the time of the year, only productive in winter, but mostly running at 50% on summer evenings and almost 0% the rest of the summer day. Imagine the cost of those plants, the maintenance, the people monitoring and managing the plants in 3 shifts just in case something happens to the grid. Solar and wind have made these gas and coal plants really expensive per unit of energy produced, but we cannot dismantle these plants because we absolutely need them to be connected to the grid.
The total supply of hydropower is quite limited... God has not blessed us with Norwegian fjords all over the world.
While batteries provide some supply in the evening, they produce almost nothing in the early morning before solar takes over to recharge the batteries during the day. This shows that the capacity of the batteries is meant to last for 4 to 6 hours max, but not for 12 hours continuous operation, so they cannot cover the whole night efficiently during the entire time when solar is not producing. Redondancy could solve this, but it would make the batteries less efficient and less economical.
Take a sunny day in California as an example to best visualise the limits of solar production. See the hourly production source on the Californian electricity grid on 19th of May 2025 below on figure 7B:
Figure 7B: California's electricity supply on May 19th, 2025
The key takeaways from Figure 7B above are:
- Even with significant solar production during the day, approximately 20% of other dispatchable sources are required for grid formation (frequency stability) and to balance supply with dynamic demand.
- While batteries are well deployed in California and contribute to evening peak demand, they only account for a fraction of the peak load at 8 pm and do not last more than four to six hours. This means they produce very little during the late evening, night and early morning demand.
- Even with a large proportion of solar power during the day, solar power only covers around 50% of total demand over 24 hours. We still need dispatchable sources such as hydropower, gas, and imports from other dispatchable sources. Even if 10 times more solar parks were deployed in California, the consumption picture would be the same and 90% of solar production would simply be cut off or curtailed during the day due to overcapacity. Once solar power has reached its deployment limits, like now in California, additional solar power does not replace other dispatchable sources; it simply gets curtailed because the added solar power does not produce during peak demand in the morning and evening.
Let's now compare California to germany with those graphs in Figure 7D & 7E below, which shows the source of electricity production in Germany at different times of the year.
Figure 7E: Electricity supply and demand in Germany, 1st week of July 2024
There are a few notable things to note here:
Most of the time, demand is higher than supply, which means that Germany is completely dependent on imports of French nuclear power and Norwegian hydroelectricity. Without interconnections, the german grid would not work on its own.
In January (winter) there is a lot more coal and gas consumption, while in May (spring) the total demand is lower and solar covers more of the demand during the day.
There are windy and sunny days like 9-11 March that reduce fossil fuel consumption, which is the real added value of wind and solar. But on some other non-windy days, such as 5-7 March, coal and gas are the biggest source of supply when there is not much wind. Germany absolutely needs these gas and coal-fired power stations to remain on the grid.
Overall, Germany is an electricity importer, as shown on Figure 7E above, even in the summer when wind and solar are both producing.
Most of the load balancing and peaking comes from coal and gas, which can be turned on and off in a matter of minutes. The total amount shown on Figure 7D is the total supply, not the demand. Actual demand or consumption is actually lower, and wind and/or solar supply is simply taken off the grid during this moment of oversupply, either by exporting to neighbouring countries or by curtailing supply. You can see this example on the 8th of March during the day when the peak supply reached almost 20 MWh, but the actual demand at that moment was probably around 12 to 14 MWh, meaning that there is an oversupply of solar during the day. The peak demand in the early morning and evening is around breakfast and dinner time.
There are moments like the 18th of January in the evening or 24th of May in the morning, the wind is hardly blowing and it is night, so almost none of the supply comes from the 2 "renewable sources", although it is a moment of peak demand. At this very moment, if there were 10 times more solar panels and 10 times more windmills in Germany, we would still have to turn on the coal and gas plants to produce electricity. 10 times zero equals zero. That's why adding up the total electricity produced by "renewable" sources, comparing that sum to the total electricity consumed by Germany, and if the ratio is, say, 33%, then claiming that <<if we tripled our installation of renewable sources, we would be 100% renewable>> is a big lie to the public. Tripling solar production when you already have overproduction on summer days does nothing, and tripling the size of an unproductive solar farm during winter evenings would still be an unproductive solar farm.
While the capacity factor of solar panels worldwide is around 20%, it is only 12% in Germany due to the bad weather and the northern latitude. The capacity factor is the average output over a year compared to the maximum possible output. This means that if a 100 MW solar farm is connected to the german grid, it will only produce 12 MW of power on average over the year. Much of the downtime is due to the long winter nights, cloudy days or simply the low angle of incidence of the sun in the upper northern hemisphere. And when the solar parks are producing well in the middle of the day in the summer, they are basically producing too much electricity and Germany is forced to sell it to its neighbours at near-zero prices or simply reduce its production. Germany doesn't need more solar at all now, but is adding more every year, based on ideology, politics, numbers that don't tell the whole truth, and because the neighbouring countries are willing to buy the German surplus and provide dispatchable power to Germany during the intermittency off-peak.
Wind turbines have a capacity of about 3MW, while a nuclear plant is about 1GW, so you would need about 300 wind turbines to have the same capacity. If you look at the capacity factor, which is the average output over a year compared to the maximum possible output, wind turbines are at 30% and nuclear plants at 90%, so you would actually need 3 times more wind turbines to produce the same total energy, or about 1000 wind turbines for 1 nuclear plant. Wind turbines are massive concrete and steel structures that can be up to 250 metres high and have to be placed at a distance of 1 km to each other. If we focus on the material footprint and especially the surface footprint of 1000 wind turbines compared to 1 nuclear power plant, the ratio in both cases is about 1 to 1000 in terms of km² to produce the same power. In a densely populated country like Germany, it is absolutely stupid to go all-in on wind and solar. It makes sense to have a wind turbine in Denmark or the south of Spain, but not in a densely populated country like Germany.
What makes the most pragmatic and economic sense for Germany would be to reactivate most of the 9 shut down and idled nuclear plants of the last 20 years, which were shut down for political and ideological reasons, but were working perfectly fine at the time of shutdown.
If you consider that a brand new nuclear power plant in the West costs on average about 10 billion dollars and takes about 10 years to build, Germany potentially has at least 5 of them that could be refurbished and restarted for a tenth of the price and a fifth of the time. It would make so much sense for Germany and for Europe to put those 9 nuclear plants back on the grid that it would massively reduce the average consumer price of electricity and the amount of natural gas needed and also reduce baseload coal consumption. This is just an example of the politics and ideology of an imaginary perfect "clean" world where stupid decisions are made and the consequences are felt years later and no one wants to admit the causality.
To sum up Germany's electricity strategy, it's to build more solar panels that produce at a time when there's already an oversupply, and that don't produce at all when we need them most, at peak times in winter, around breakfast and dinner, and to leave idle former nuclear power stations that have already been built and amortised. Not a good strategy, Germany!
I'll give one final example to show that wind energy has similar limitations to solar energy and that both have the same issues. Intermittent renewables (wind and solar) can only cover 40–60% of total electricity consumption and the more intermittent renewables there are on a grid, the higher the final electricity bill for consumers. Consider Ireland, a country with almost no coal-fired power plants, which hosts the headquarters of major tech companies and most of Europe's data centres. The electricity demand there is expected to rise with the arrival of AI. Figure 7F below shows the disparity in consumption sources on four random days in four seasons of 2024 in Ireland.
Figure 7F: Electricity consumption per source in Ireland in 2024
The overall energy mix in Ireland in 2024 (see graph above) was around 45% fossil fuels, 40% intermittent renewables and 15% imports, mostly nuclear and hydropower from other countries. These are dispatchable sources that can be used when there is no wind in Ireland. The future will likely show it is impossible to increase the share of intermittent renewables above 50%.
Looking at four random days in each season, it can be seen that during winter, when the wind is mostly blowing strongly, wind power accounts for the largest share of production, which is positive. However, in spring and summer, wind tends to blow less frequently, and gas turbines fulfil the demand. Solar power plays an insignificant role as Ireland is located at a high northern latitude and does not always have good sunshine. On a day in autumn without wind, 80% of demand is met by gas sources and 10% by imports. This means that the Irish grid must be designed to meet 90% of peak demand with gas turbines for days like this autumn day, in order to avoid a blackout. If Ireland's electricity demand rises by 50% in the next 10 years due to additional AI data centres, it will need to install 50% more gas-fired power plants to meet demand, as data centres run 24/7 independently of the amount of solar and wind power installed. A dispatchable source such as gas must be available to meet peak demand when there is no wind at all. You can now imagine how expensive these 'back-up' gas power plants are going to be when they are asked to operate at an average of 30% of their capacity, as they are idle most of the time and only turned on during non-windy days. This high price will be passed on to the end consumer.
Even though 'renewable' energy is the cheapest form of electricity production, the utilities make almost no profit. Why is this?
Utilities are paid on an hourly basis according to the highest bid to meet demand at that particular hour. The end consumer, you and me, is basically charged the yearly average cost of the total grid production, transmission and distribution. Why is this important for solar and wind producers? Because when those utilities are producing because the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, they're all producing at the same time, so all the producers are the cheap ones, so the final price during that hour is low and the margin of utilities is thin. But during the "dunkelflaute" periods, when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, none of them are producing, leaving only the other dispatchable sources, including the infrequently used back-up plants, which make the final price in that specific hour very expensive, but none of the wind or solar producers benefit from these high prices.
Essentially, when wind and solar are producing, there is an abundance of production, so energy is cheap and oversupplied, and when wind and solar are not available, none of the wind and solar sources are producing and prices spike. That's why solar and wind can only cover about 50% of total annual production at most. That's because any additional wind or solar source would only produce when there's already an oversupply, and would not produce when it's really needed at peak times (evenings in winter).
You would need a massive battery storage system, about 100 times more than what is already installed in a year, just to cover 6h of storage, or you would have to be blessed with mountains and a lot of hydropower like in Uruguay, Brazil or Norway. Otherwise, all industrialised countries will rely on coal and gas fired power plants for basically half of their total production, with nuclear as a nice add-on. (Except France, which gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear).
I am not saying that solar or wind energy sources are useless.
In the Canary Islands, with a low population density, 12 hours of sunshine and 20°C all year round, regular wind, few energy-intensive industries, and being islands isolated from the continent, it makes perfect sense to build an electricity grid that is 100% solar, wind and battery storage, and it is perfectly feasible.
In Norway, a very small population spread over a huge country, lots of fjords, mountains, lakes and rivers providing abundant sources of hydroelectricity, you can absolutely run an electricity grid based on almost 100% hydroelectricity.
I am just saying that Germany, with its high population density, lots of industry, a relatively flat country without much hydroelectric power, a long tradition of hatred and fear of nuclear power going back to WW2, long winters with very little sunshine, erratic winds, this country is absolutely impossible to run on "renewable" sources. This country is destined for gas and LNG imports and coal-fired power stations. The "100% renewable" makes no sense at all in this case and will never be achieved.
A dollar or euro is a stock, a reserve of value, whereas electricity is a flow that has to be consumed immediately as it is produced. Batteries are very limited in size and duration, so they don't qualify for global grid coverage.
If you sell a piece of furniture for $50, you can use this money right away or at any time in the future. You can also use it to buy something other than furniture. A dollar retains its value (certainly for about six months). A dollar is worth the same in summer as in winter, at rush hour at 8 am as in the middle of the night at 3 am.
If you had $2,000 but couldn't spend any of it on dinner or clubbing, that would be awful. It would also be awful if you had $2,000 in the summer that would turn into $500 in the winter. That's solar energy. If you had $2,000 available at any time for 3 days, that would be great, but if that money would disappear completely for the next 3 days, leaving you unable to buy groceries or eat during that time, that would be awful. That's wind energy.
Electricity from renewable energy sources can only be used when it is produced, which is mostly in the middle of the day and in summer. All intermittent renewable energy sources in a given region produce energy at roughly the same time, so adding more does not fill the supply gaps. Even if these sources were free and unlimited, they would not meet the demand for electricity during the evening, at night or during the winter peak. Claiming that renewables are cheap and abundant is somewhat true and appealing, but it does not meet the needs of our on-demand society. I would rather have a $2 note in my pocket than the equivalent amount of solar electricity, because I can use the $2 note whenever I want for whatever I want.
An electrical grid working on 95% renewable energy is an ideological sound strategy, but it cannot power our kind of civilisation. Especially in flat geography, high population density, high industry dependent, high latitude countries like Germany, this is the worst candidate to apply this strategy. It's like giving smoothies, yoga sessions, sleeping pills and painkillers to a guy addicted to fentanyl: You don't solve any problem at all.
That's why adding more and more wind and solar power to the world's electricity supply doesn't do the grid any good beyond a certain level, say 40%, but It actually worsens and threatens the stability of the grid, its ability to maintain a 50Hz frequency and absorb the peaks and valleys of demand. Unless there is a back-up storage solution to cover the intermittency, solar and wind alone are not the answer. This brings us to the need for large-scale storage systems to cover daily and seasonal intermittency. Let's look at that.
- Electricity storage
The intermittency of solar and wind raises the issue of energy storage: an excess supply of energy at one time that can be captured and returned at a later time when demand is high. Without storage, wind and solar will never be the dominant energy source.
And that is the problem: There is no existing grid-scale solution for long-term storage.
ESS batteries have a capacity of 2 to 6 hours. Although very costly, it is conceivable that in some year-round sunny locations, an oversupply of solar energy could be captured for 12 hours a day and restored the rest of the time by two sets of batteries, one for the evening and one for the morning. Batteries could potentially solve the daily intermittency of solar, in certain geographical areas for a certain population (low density, low industry), but they cannot store the seasonal intermittency. Depending on the country, we would need up to 50 days of summer storage to be restored in winter. 50 days! Batteries store for 6 hours, not 50 days. Batteries are not the answer to long-term storage and seasonal variations. The scale required to build the volume of batteries would be mind-boggling. Redox-flow batteries are not commercially proven on this scale either.
Pumped hydro, a simple solution in which water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir during periods of excess electricity production, and then released through a turbine when needed during peak demand, is a technical solution. But there are not enough areas in the world with enough space for two lakes, separated by altitude, that are large enough and in sufficient quantity to meet the grid's need for winter storage. Again, it is a question of scale. We would have to create artificial lakes throughout the Alps just to meet Germany's needs.
Pumped hydro, a well-mastered technology, can meet only a fraction of the total storage needs because geography does not provide enough viable sites for natural lakes and reservoirs that are separated by altitude but close enough to be linked by pipes and turbines.
The best lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of 500 Wh/kg. Oil has an energy density of about 10,000 Wh/kg, that's 20 times more than a battery!
That's why even if 70% of the energy in an internal combustion engine vehicle is lost to heat dissipation, it's still more efficient than a combination of electric batteries and electric motor (20% to 30% total loss), and that's why the 60 litre diesel tank is replaced by a 300 kg battery in EVs, which is about 5 times heavier.
The same applies to hydropower: Most of the populated areas are relatively flat, there are not enough mountains and river flows to build enough hydroelectric dams for storage. In fact, most of the potential areas for hydropower already have hydropower plants. There are very few untapped areas.
We cannot store 2 months of electricity demand in batteries and pumped hydro.
Currently in many countries like Germany, USA etc... we store 1 to 3 months of hydrocarbures (gas or coal) for various operational and security reasons, including seasonal intermittency. And so the 1 to 3 months of electricity storage is done by the water storage of hydropower plants, and indirectly by the storage of coal and constant supply of gas.
Until we find a solution to intermittency, fossil fuels will remain the main source of energy, even for electricity generation. And remember, electricity generation accounts for only 20% of total energy consumption. We have not addressed the other 80% of energy that is not used for electricity, such as industrial applications.
- A limit on total production from wind and solar
Germany currently generates 40% of its electricity from wind and solar.
If we doubled the amount of solar and wind on the grid, would we have 80% of the electricity from "renewables"? The answer is no, we would have 50%.
And if we had 10 times more wind and solar overnight? We would still be around 50% to 60%.
Why? Because solar and wind always produce when the other solar and wind are already producing, which means that at certain moments you have too much electricity produced by renewables, but at other moments, the "dark period" or "Dunkelflaute", you have almost zero produced by wind and solar. And 10 times zero is still zero. That's why getting to around 50% is the maximum you can do with intermittent sources alone, Because the sun never shines at night and the wind does not blow constantly for 365 days. Adding more renewables now would just mean curtailing overproduction, and we would still consume mainly fossil fuel sources when its dark and not windy.
Why 50%? because in most places on earth, out of the 24 hours x 365 days of the year, half the time the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Some places like islands close to the equator can reach 70% or 80%, like the Canary Islands. But for Germany, Japan, the UK and other densely populated and industrialised countries in the upper northern hemisphere, wind and solar energy will only cover a maximum of around 60% of the country's demand or consumption, regardless of the amount of solar panels and wind turbines installed on the grid.
Figure 8A: US installed capacity in 2023
As you can see from Figure 8A above, the sum of the dispatchable sources of gas, coal, nuclear power, hydropower and batteries makes up around 70% of the installed capacity. This is because, if there is a period without wind or sunshine during the evening peak, the grid must be able to supply enough power to meet peak demand. Solar and wind power will never account for more than 50% of total consumption. Even if we installed a trillion gigawatts of solar and wind power, those sources would still be curtailed, meaning that 'renewable' energy would only cover a maximum of 50% of total yearly consumption.
That's why adding up new 'renewable' sources with the aim of achieving 100% 'renewable' sources is a fantasy based on wishful ideology, it's a big lie to the public. Tripling solar production when you already have overproduction on summer days does nothing, and tripling the size of an unproductive solar farm during winter evenings would still be an unproductive solar farm.
That's why adding up new 'renewable' sources with the aim of achieving 100% 'renewable' sources is a fantasy based on wishful ideology, it's a big lie to the public. Tripling solar production when you already have overproduction on summer days does nothing, and tripling the size of an unproductive solar farm during winter evenings would still be an unproductive solar farm.
Also, areas where solar installation makes the most sense are close to the equator, where there is a similar length of day in summer and winter. Wind farm installation only makes sense in specific corridors, usually located between mountains and oceans. The issue is that most people on Earth live in areas where neither wind nor solar power is an adequate option, meaning that for wind and solar power to be effective, huge capacity would need to be installed in unpopulated areas, and transmission lines stretching several thousand kilometres would need to be built to connect them to populated areas. This would require political willingness and agreement between regions and countries, as well as additional grid costs.
Figure 9A: Where solar makes sense
Figure 9B: Where wind (blue) and solar (green) make sense
Figures 9A and 9B above show that very few areas are geographically suitable for solar power. California, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Morocco and Australia have long sunny days all year round. For wind, only a few areas such as the central USA, northern Europe, Mongolia, Australia and South Africa are adequate zones, which limits the deployment of effective wind farms. China and most of Europe are not suited to renewable energy, which makes solar power less effective and less cost-attractive in these regions. Figure 9B also shows that half of the world's population is located within the dotted black circle in East Asia, an area that is mostly inadequate for both wind and solar power. The same applies to densely populated areas in West Africa and Europe. These cities with black dots on Figures 9A and 9B are not located in areas particularly suited to wind and solar deployment, meaning the deployment of renewables depends on the rapid growth of the grid and new transmission lines. Activities in energy transmission and distribution are usually subject to public funding and responsibility, and thus lack the investment and speed of private investors in energy generation.
Problems arise on the grid during periods when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, during what is called a "Dunkelflaute": Price spike to find a marginal producer of last resort and we risk a local blackout for not generating enough electricity to meet the demand. However, the opposite is also an issue: Periods when the sun shines and the wind blows a lot, called 'Hellbrise', generate too much energy.
The electricity grid is a complex system in which supply and demand must be equal every second. This must be the case not just on average or in total, but every second. This means that during periods of high share of intermittent renewable energy production, grid operators must cut loads by compensating consumers or exporting the excess energy to neighbouring countries that participate in the grid. However, when the sun shines and the wind blows in one region of the world, it is usually the same 500 km away, meaning that the grid can experience an oversupply of energy. Roof top solars being privately owned and not operated by the grid, they add to the issue by not having the option to be forced switched off the grid. Oversupply increases the frequency of the grid, which can damage industrial equipment, equally to an undersupply and a too low frequency. Therefore, the frequency must be maintained at precisely 50 Hz in Europe and 60 Hz in the USA, no more and no less. Both an over supply or an undersupply of electricity is dangerous for the grid.
The problem we have during windy summers in the middle of the day is that most of the grid's supply comes from wind and solar power. These sources have little inertia, meaning that if one wind or solar farm fails, the energy and frequency supply drops immediately from 100% to 0%, unlike huge turbines which continue to rotate at the same frequency for several seconds after power is cut. One failure in frequency or power supply can trigger a cascade of load shedding and supply cuts, potentially resulting in a complete blackout within 2 seconds.
Due to the "merit order" principle, whereby the cheapest producers are selected each hour and the most expensive ones are excluded, all the available solar and wind energy is usually included on the grid, while coal, gas and nuclear energy are excluded or left idle sometimes. This means that the proportion of energy sources without inertia on the grid is very high in the "Hellbrise" period. However, by selecting sources based solely on the cost per kWh and not considering a minimum number of sources with inertia, we put the grid at risk of being unable to maintain a stable frequency or recover in the event of a sudden supply failure or sudden increase in demand.
Frequency and inertia are two critical technical features that make a grid reliable and flexible enough to accommodate the ups and downs in load consumption by end users. This is why the grid was originally designed to incorporate only large rotating masses (turbines) from nuclear, hydropower, gas and coal-fired power plants. However, with the massive addition of wind and solar power over the last 10 years, we have introduced supply sources without inertia that operate at 100% or 0% without continuity and are unable to produce or maintain a stable frequency in the grid. Whenever more than 60% to 70% of the supply comes from wind and solar, the electricity grid is at risk. The more intermittent renewables we install, the closer we get to an unmanageable grid, massive cut-offs and, eventually, a national or international blackout like the one that hit Spain and Portugal for 8 hours in April 2025.
Our utopian belief in a 100% renewable grid will cause consumer prices to keep rising and bring us closer to massive and repetitive blackouts. At the current rate of installation, this will affect us within the next five years as we install more wind and solar capacity. Bear in mind that without electricity, you cannot take public transport, pay for things, buy groceries, cook at home, light up your home, use elevators, have a mobile phone or internet connection,heat up water or pump fresh water to your tap, and some hospitals without backup generator turn dark, so a life without electricity would be very inconvenient, to say the least.
The grid is a fragile miracle and the number of incidents has steadily increased since 2012, correlated with the rising installation of solar and wind capacity. We are getting closer to major failures and blackouts than people realise. We must treat the electricity grid rationally and pragmatically, based on physics and technical limitations rather than political ideologies, and limit the amount of intermittent renewable energy to a low percentage due to technical risks and limitations.
In an ideal world, about 70% of our electricity would come from nuclear power for baseload, to meet minimum demand. The remaining 30% would come from hydropower and pump storage, to cover peak demand and load fluctuations. This would create a flexible, low-carbon, dispatchable grid. However, this setup is mostly impossible outside of France because countries have been reluctant to build that many nuclear power stations due to concerns about safety, supply, technology and dependency, and not all countries have plenty of mountains and river flows like Brazil or Norway, so hydropower is geographically limited to around 10% of the total electric supply of a country. This is why grids usually comprise a combination of nuclear power, hydropower, gas and coal turbines, solar power, wind power, batteries and biogas.
- Drivers of integrated cost of electricity
One factor affecting the final price of electricity is that wind and solar power have a much larger land footprint than coal, gas or nuclear power, so wind and solar farms tend to be located far from major cities and far from consumer industries, in a remote place where land is cheap. This means they have more transmission lines and more grid distribution costs than a large nuclear plant and 1 short distance transmission line. Also, because wind and solar farms tend to be scattered across a country rather than concentrated in one place, you need more flexibility in the grid in terms of distribution, traffic and redirecting power from producer to consumer, which means more DC/AC invertors, more low/high voltage transformers, more control equipment, and more operation and maintenance costs in the grid.
Figure 10B below shows that the price of electricity generation in the US has declined by 35% over the last 20 years, mostly due to the dramatic decline in the prices of solar, wind and battery technologies (by 60 to 80%), as well as the abundance of cheap shale gas. Solar, wind and battery prices are falling as these energy sources become more widespread, but this means the grid needs to be upgraded to handle more interconnections, which has led to a 160% surge in transmission and distribution costs over the past 20 years.
Figure 10B: US generation, transmission and distribution spending
As US consumers pay for generation, transmission and distribution, the installation of additional 'renewable' capacity has resulted in a 45% increase in the price of electricity for consumers in cities between 2020 and 2025, as shown in Figure 10C below.
Figure 10C: US cities average electricity price
Another point to consider: Wind and solar farms in an area, a country or a small continent like Europe, all produce at the same time, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, so you tend to have a lot of surplus or overproduction at certain times and underproduction at peak times when you need electricity the most. When it is night in Lisbon, it is usually night in Berlin. When the wind is strong in Amsterdam, it is usually blowing in Paris too.
The periods of overproduction of "renewables" are mostly shut down and lost, while the underproduction times are made up by expensive coal and gas plants, which increase operating costs because they are designed to shut down at times of high wind/solar production. So whatever cheap electricity you get from wind and solar at peak production times is offset by the high cost of meeting peak demand from fossil fuels.
The final point to consider is that if a gas or coal-fired power station is producing constantly 24 hours a day, the cost per unit of energy produced is the lowest possible. But if we ask these dispatchable sources to produce at full power only from 7 to 9 a.m. and from 6 to 9 p.m., but to remain on standby at 20% of their capacity for the other 19 hours of the day, you end up with a very high cost per unit of energy produced, and that's because you always have fixed costs that are now divided by 5 hours of production instead of 24 hours of production: debt interest payments, maintenance workers on shift work, lights, security, maintaining a minimum power to keep the plant running, etc...
The more intermittent sources you have on a grid, the more the dispatchable and adaptable sources will have to make way for them, reducing their total output and making them more expensive per unit of energy produced. This will lead us to an unsustainable situation where gas and coal plants become more and more expensive per kWh, but you absolutely need all those plants on the grid to meet peak demand! Do not trust the reports that say coal and gas plants are expensive: They are made expensive by the inflexible "renewables" and are the actual hidden heroes when everyone turns on the lights and heaters at 7pm.
Figure 10D below illustrates the additional cost to the grid of managing the intermittent nature of solar and wind sources. The UK has added a lot of wind and solar power over the last 10 years, but has not added many dispatchable coal or gas power plants. Consequently, grid balancing costs have escalated since 2020, and the UK now boasts some of the most expensive electricity prices worldwide.
Figure 10D: Grid balancing costs in the UK
The economics of wind and solar power unravel when you ask them to meet society's needs and behave like real power plants, able to match demand on a second-by-second basis. This may come as a surprise, given that we have been told for years by governments, banks, think tanks and the industry itself that wind and solar are the cheapest energy sources ever built. However, this has always been a narrow view based on project-level metrics such as Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). LCOE asks: 'What does it cost to generate one megawatt-hour at the project site?' However, it ignores the cost of converting intermittent, weather-dependent output into reliable and stable 24/7 power. Although LCOE shows that solar and wind have fallen from being the most expensive energy sources 15 years ago to being the least expensive electricity sources today, it is a biased measure of the cost of a single project. It does not reflect the total cost to the grid. It does not include the additional costs of backup, storage, grid integration and transmission; the challenge of matching supply and demand second by second; grid and frequency stability; or the higher induced cost of dispatchable power sources that must remain idle to make room for intermittent sources. The entire promise of the energy transition is based on an accounting illusion. Wind and solar power may be cheap to generate, but not at system or grid level. The core issue is that intermittent sources do not provide firm capacity. They require layers of backup, which come with their own capital investment costs (CapEx) and integration costs.
No matter how much intermittent energy you add to the grid, you will still need the grid to supply peak loads from dispatchable energy sources (gas, coal, hydro, nuclear and batteries) in case peak demand occurs when it is dark and not windy. This means that the total installed capacity of dispatchable sources cannot be reduced, as it needs to match future peak loads. In the early days, wind and solar power accounted for just a few percent of generation in grids dominated by gas, coal, hydro and nuclear power. They were classic 'free riders': Their variability and flaws were absorbed by the rest of the system and markets did not price their intermittency. However, as their share increased, so did the need for flexible thermal backup, grid-responsive controls, improved forecasting and new transmission. These real costs do not show up in the LCOE assessment, but they do show up on consumers' energy bills. Even worse, wind and solar power generation often occurs at the same time, crashing the prices of other intermittent producers and reducing their own market value. As curtailments rise, thermal plants must cover the gaps, pushing total system costs even higher. Spain’s April 2025 blackout revealed just how fragile this arrangement becomes without deep reform of grid operations and legislation. What works at 10% penetration fails at 40% or more. The cheaper cost of installing renewables doesn’t solve the problem of intermittency. They do not eliminate the need for backup. Nor do they eliminate the costs of grid integration. This isn’t an argument against technology. It's an acknowledgement of physical, economic and thermodynamic limitations. It is not possible to force inverter-based renewables into a system designed for synchronous, frequency-stabilising machines with inertia and expect power output stability to be free and final consumer price to remain low. Frequency control isn’t a minor detail; it’s fundamental. The more inverter-fed generation we add, the harder and more costly that control becomes.
Adding 1 megawatt of intermittent capacity to the grid does not increase the available capacity during peak hours. It also does not increase transmission lines, substations, transformers or grid stability. This is why capacity-only planning is becoming increasingly misleading. In a system with weather-dependent and energy-constrained resources, nameplate megawatt capacity alone is insufficient. You also need on-demand generation and transmission to move it, as well as the essential reliability services that thermal plants used to provide by default, such as voltage support, frequency response, ramping and reserves.
Before a large generator plant can be connected, the operator must study whether the local and regional systems can handle it. If not, upgrades are required, such as substations, transformers, transmission lines and protection systems. These take years to obtain permission for, purchase and build. Data centres, however, can be built quickly. Grid capacity cannot. Electricity grids in the industrial world are not yet experiencing a shortage of fuel. It’s a delivery problem. Electricity demand is rising now after decades of stagnation, but the system cannot add firm capacity, transmission, transformers and interconnections within the timeframe implied by EVs, AI and solar and wind parks. This mismatch is obvious to anyone looking at queues and lead times, yet political leaders still talk as if more supply can simply be ordered and more electricity will just appear for the end consumer.
The deeper issue is that the increasing complexity of multiple energy sources spread over multiple locations puts greater strain on grid operation. The physical system cannot be expanded or maintained at the pace of demand growth.
Electricity will become a serious constraint within the next decade. However, the nearer-term obstacles are simpler yet more challenging: grid transmission lines, permitting, construction times, turbine and transformer backlogs, a shortage of skilled labour, capital costs and the hard limits of grid physics. Ignore these constraints and you won't get more electricity. Instead, you get cost overruns, schedule delays, and a widening gap between demand and deliverable capacity.
The climate crisis is real. Someone sold the idea of switching to wind and solar power because it sounds like a feels-good simple solution that everyone can understand. You can advertise it, get everyone on board, create an industry around it and make money. We switched to intermittent renewables based on the promise of a full-scale grid (the net-zero narrative) in order to redesign the global energy system. Everyone nodded, despite there being no successful demonstration to power a small town with renewable energy and batteries year-long. Unfortunately, intermittent renewables do not work physically, technically or economically beyond a penetration rate of 30–40%. We believed that we could transition to a fully electric, renewable economy without addressing growth, consumption or planetary limits. The carbon pulse that began in the late 18th century with the use of coal and the Industrial Revolution has given us two centuries of abundance. If you replace the carbon source with intermittent renewable sources that are more diffuse, unreliable and material-hungry, your civilisation will be prone to blackouts, rationing, rising consumer prices, loss of energy security, outsourcing of local energy-consuming industries, loss of purchasing power, and massive protests and social unrest.
- Fossil fuels and hydropower to compensate for intermittency
Our society is based on electricity being available the second we need it, every time we flick the switch, we expect the light to come on. Because we cannot control the timing of wind and solar energy supply compared to the timing of energy consumption, the grid needs additional equipment, baseload backup sources, basically a second power generation system that can produce on demand when wind and solar are not producing. The installed baseload capacity must be such that it can meet peak demand even at the worst possible time, when solar and wind are delivering zero. If peak demand is at 7pm on a winter day when it is night and still with no wind outside, you need a grid with supply from sources other than wind and solar that can deliver the power society needs to turn on heat, lights, TVs and charge EVs at that specific moment. No one is prepared for a blackout, nor does anyone anticipate the possibility of a blackout.
Essentially, whatever the amount of renewables you put on a grid, intermittent renewables need a back-up grid of dispatchable power sources, usually hydro, coal and gas, which by definition do not run 100% of the time to accommodate the intermittency of the renewables. This means that no matter how much solar and wind has been installed in the last decade and in the decades to come, we will need coal, gas, nuclear, biomass and hydro to meet the peak demand that is expected to increase as we continue to electrify our society.
We expect to have many coal and gas-fired power stations that will sit idle most of the time, only to be available at peak times. The cost per unit of energy from these sources will, of course, skyrocket compared to the same coal or gas-fired power plant that used to supply all day long, because you still need people to monitor and be on standby at all times, even when the plant is not supplying to the grid.
This makes the whole grid and the consumer price of electricity more expensive. You basically have 2 grids of the same size in parallel, one running while the other waits its turn. On top of that, you have a much more difficult grid balancing act, more monitoring to do to balance the sources.
In addition, because wind and especially solar can suddenly drop out of the grid in a matter of seconds when a dark cloud passes, there are problems with the grid such as frequency drops and sudden load drops, which have to be compensated by additional devices such as batteries, rotating inertial wheels, etc... all of which are additional costs for the end consumer.
The levelized cost of energy (LCOE), which takes into account the total cost of manufacturing, operating and dismantling the system over its entire lifecycle, is a distorted measure for quantifying the cost of solar and wind. That's because electricity cannot be stored, but we all expect electricity to be available when we need it. When wind and solar are producing electricity, they are definitely the cheapest source of electricity. But it has 2 side effects: It forces the other dispatchable sources to shut down when solar and wind are producing, reducing the total output of the dispatchable sources and increasing their cost per unit of energy produced. Second, wind and solar require back-up dispatchable plants that are idle most of the time, but are expected to come on at the moment when there is no wind and no sun. And at that moment you can imagine that the reserve plant with a capacity factor of 5% or 10% has a really high cost. So if you look at the total average price to the end user over a full year, 365/24/7, the low cost production moments of solar and wind are dwarfed by the "dark" moments of no wind and no sun, which are very expensive.
The true levelized cost of renewable energy, both to the grid and to the end consumer, is much higher than people claim.
For an industrialised or densely populated country, a strategy of maximising solar and wind energy on the grid is sustainable as long as the end user pays a flat rate per kWh, regardless of when we use it. The problem with a flat rate for the end user is that it incentivises more wind and solar and does not incentivise the addition of back-up dispatchable sources to meet peak winter electricity demand. A flat rate does not incentivise end users to adjust their demand and shift consumption during periods of overproduction. A flat rate for the end user brings the grid closer to regular blackouts, either by having too much power on the grid on summer days or too little power on winter evenings. I think Europe has to reach that point of severe blackout to impose an hourly rate, and then the incentive would change dramatically, both for producing utilities and for end-consumers, and that would be the end of the growth of renewable installations on the grid.
The more renewables we install, the greater the risk of blackouts. If (when) Europe is faced with these recurring problems, the EU will be forced to impose an hourly tariff and we will have a huge disparity like 3 cents per kWh in summer at 2pm but 70 cents per kWh in winter at 7pm.... and then you'll have all the solar and wind suppliers making a loss because they all produce at the same time as everyone else when the hourly tariff rate is low, in other words they all produce when there is already an excess of production and none produce when the other sources are not producing.
Although Denmark generates 60-70% of its electricity from wind power, it is still a net importer of electricity overall. It absolutely depends on its neighbours to provide electricity when the wind is not blowing. It is also important to note that Denmark is a small country in terms of geographical size and has few heavy industries.
No large country runs on more than 50% renewable energy (wind and solar) without being dependent on net imports due to intermittency. Norway is independent and net exporter because 80% of its electricity comes from hydropower, which can be dispatched as required. France is independent and net exporter because 70% of its electricity comes from nuclear power and 20% from hydropower, both of which are dispatchable. Germany was a net exporter from 2005 until 2022, but has become a net importer due to its substantial additions of wind and solar capacity.
Take Germanyor UK for example, a dense and industrialised country way up in the northern hemisphere, which means very short days in winter. The German strategy is to have as much solar and wind as possible, no nuclear power at all, and to meet demand with coal, gas, biomass and imported electricity from neighbouring countries. The German grid only works because during the day in summer they export their overproduction of solar power, or force other countries to import it. And in winter, during peak hours at breakfast and dinner time, it imports nuclear power from France, hydroelectric power from Norway and coal power from Poland. The only reason the grid is not blacked out is because France, Norway and Poland have a strategy of mass dispatchable sources like hydropower and coal-fired power plants. If every other neighbouring country had the same share of solar and wind power as Germany, there would be blackout after blackout in northern Europe. And we may soon have them, if Europe's renewable energy frenzy continues. Germany's renewable energy strategy only works because its neighbours do not have a maximum solar and wind strategy, but instead have a large amount of dispatchable energy to accommodate the ups and downs of live electricity demand. It's an illusion to think that a grid based mainly on renewables will work. It would be like asking end users to heat their homes in summer instead of winter, and to cook dinner at 3am instead of 7pm. This is not going to happen, we are an on-demand society. The stupid German electricity strategy, together with EU regulation and forcing open networks and competition, is the reason why EDF (French utility) is selling nuclear electricity at a loss, and why Norway recently protested violently (December 12th of 2024) when we came within 2 inches of a blackout in Northern Europe.
- Final consumer price
Intermittent renewables require a backup grid of dispatchable power sources, which by definition do not run 100% of the time, to accommodate and make room for the intermittency of the renewables. When you factor in the hidden costs of the collateral side-effect of displacing gas and coal-fired power stations, making their electricity more expensive per unit of production, the total cost to the end user is higher.
Intermittent renewable energy is like renting a small AirBNB apartment for one night for €100, throwing a big party with 30 people, and leaving the place with water damage, stains on the walls, sticky floors, etc., without paying the extra charge for intensive cleaning. That's why booking a party event is like €500 a night, not €100, because it includes intensive cleaning the next day, not like a regular overnight stay in an apartment.
Intermittent renewable energy abuses the system due to 3 unfair facts that will not last forever: it benefits from government subsidies, you can buy a finished unit all made in China at a ridiculously low price (coal, gas and nuclear have to be built locally with local labour, solar panels can be imported) and most importantly the output electricity for the producer is bought at a flat rate per long term contract and the end user also pays a basic flat rate for the year at a fixed EUR/kWh. If producers and/or end users were to pay on an hourly basis, as should be the case, with prices varying from 3 cents/kWh during the summer day to 70 cents/kWh at dinner time in the winter, I guarantee that not a single solar park would make a profit now. If (when) we face regular blackouts due to over-supply during the summer day and under-supply during peak winter hours, the EU regulator may adjust its policy and that would be the end of solar and wind as dominant sources on the grid of industrialised economies.
A wind turbine (akin to a solar panel) does not continuously operate at maximum capacity. Sometimes it is idle because there is no wind; sometimes it produces a little because it is mildly windy; and sometimes it is very windy and produces power at full capacity. On average on earth, it operates at full power for about 30% of the time, or 30% of its maximum capacity. This is called the capacity factor. For the sake of this example, let's assume 33%. If we were to have a 100% 'green' grid, meaning that we backed up renewables with renewables, the cost of having one wind turbine on the grid would actually be three wind turbines and massive battery storage. One turbine would supply the grid, while two turbines would charge the batteries for 33% of the time when it is windy. For the remaining 67% of the time, none of the three wind turbines would deliver energy due to the 33% capacity factor, but the batteries would be discharged into the grid. Bear in mind that there are sometimes several days without wind, so you would need to store 48 to 72 hours of electricity. This means that with 8-hour BESS batteries, you would need 9 sets of batteries, discharging one after the other, to produce electricity for 2–3 days in a row. This would require a significant number of batteries, and the charge-discharge cycle would occur once per week instead of once or twice per day. Therefore, the total cost of integrating a wind turbine into the grid would be three wind turbines and nine battery sets associated with two of the three turbines. The real cost would be 5 to 10 times higher than the cost of one wind turbine. That's the reality with renewables. The cost of fully integrating them into the grid is about five times higher than advertised. Intermittent renewable sources only function because they are backed up by massive dispatchable non-intermittent sources. A grid consisting mostly of intermittent sources is bound to result in high consumer prices and be prone to grid instability and blackouts. The greater the number of intermittent sources on the grid, the higher the final consumer price and the greater the risk of a blackout.
There is quantifiable evidence that the more solar and wind you have on a given grid, the higher the cost of electricity to the end user on an annual basis.
For the end consumer, in a country or region that invests heavily in "renewable" energy, the average final price of electricity does not fall, but rises significantly, and there is a greater risk of blackouts in the grid.
In the first half of 2024, the average price of electricity generation in Europe was around $70 per MWh, about 2.5 times higher than in the US, where it was $30 over the same period, mainly because 40% of US electricity is generated from natural gas, which is cheap, abundant, dispatchable, locally produced and able to meet peak demand.
Figures 11A and 11B show the average consumer price of electricity for industry, via 2 different sources of data.
Source: IEA and DESNZ
Figures 11C and 11D show the average consumer price of electricity for households, via 2 different sources of data.
Source: IEA 2021
Source: Eurostats 2025
Those 4 charts above show an average retail price of electricity.
What do the 5 countries with the cheapest electricity - China, Russia, Indonesia, the US and Canada - have in common? They rely on coal and gas for most of their baseload electricity.
Many middle-class people in the Western world have installed solar panels on their roofs, or are considering doing so. This includes corporations in factories and office buildings. Their electricity bills have been cut in half with very little investment, making solar energy appear to be a solution for the whole world at first glance. Have you ever asked yourself why a private person can pay a small amount upfront and reduce their electricity bill by half, yet when solar and wind energy are added massivly to the grid on a large scale, the average electricity price keeps growing? Why does it seem so simple and cheap at a private level, yet generates the opposite effect at a grid scale? There is a very good, rational explanation as to why solar energy is cheap to produce, yet increases electricity bills for grid consumers overall. The belief that solar energy is cheap and effective is an illusion caused by a historical glitch in the grid, whereby consumers pay a flat rate for the total volume of kWh consumed rather than an hourly rate dependent on the spot price at the time of consumption. Let me dig into that statement and overall solar misconception.
Historically, over the last 200 years, all sources on the electricity grid were non-intermittent and could produce electricity at any time of day or year at the same cost. First came biomass or wood-fired power plan, then hydropower and coal-fired power plants, followed by gas-fired power plants and nuclear power plants. All of these sources produced electricity at the same cost at any time it produces, whether at 7 am or 2 pm. Consequently, grid operators historically charged consumers a flat rate for the total volume consumed. If an individual consumed 100 kWh over the course of a month and the average cost of production (including transmission, distribution, and operating margin) was 30 cents per kWh, the operator would charge $30. This is why, even nowadays, household devices count the total amount of electricity consumed, not the time at which it is consumed.
Now that intermittent sources have been growing rapidly on the grid over the last 15 years and account for a large proportion of production, there are times when electricity is cheap and extremely abundant, such as at 2 pm in the summer, costing for example 10 cent/kWh, or even being free or having a negative spot price on a minute-by-minute basis. At other times, such as at 7 pm in winter on a calm day, electricity is rare and expensive to produce at around 70 cents/kWh for example because the grid operator needs to turn on reserve power plants that barely run at normal times, just to meet peak demand. If a final consumer uses 1 kWh at 10 cents/kWh and 1 kWh at 70 cents/kWh, they will have used 2 kWh for 80 cents. Therefore, the operator will charge an average or flat price of 40 cents/kWh on the yearly bill. Bear in mind that there are large solar parks in Spain, Germany and many other European countries, and that all these countries are interconnected. This phenomenon is widespread across Europe and the entire European grid.
When private individuals consume electricity generated by their own solar panels on their rooftop, they no longer consume the cheap 10 cents/kWh from the grid operator, but still consume the 70 cents/kWh from the grid at 8 pm when it is dark outside. This means that private consumers enjoy the low price of the electricity they produce themselves, but consume only the expensive electricity from the grid while paying an average of 40 cents per kWh. As a result, the average cost of electricity charged by the grid will increase from 40 cents/kWh to closer to 70 cents/kWh over time, because the grid will mostly sell expensive, hard-to-produce electricity to consumers. In other words, it forces the grid to sell only expensive electricity, so your bill increases to 70 cents/kWh instead of the previous 30 cents/kWh when there were no intermittent sources on the grid.
If the operator charged an hourly rate, electricity sold in the middle of the summer day would cost 10 cents/kWh (rather than 40 cents), meaning that private solar investment on the rooftop would not be such a good deal, as it would take 20 years to amortise the upfront costs. By consuming your own cheap electricity in the middle of the day instead of paying the grid's average price of 40 cents/kWh, consumers get a good deal. However, as a result, the grid sells less profitable electricity and more of the expensive and unprofitable electricity, forcing the operator to increase overall prices.
This is why electricity prices have been soaring in Europe over the last five years and will continue to do so as long as we keep installing more solar and wind sources. This is due to the overabundance of intermittent energy, particularly solar energy.
Wind is slightly less problematic because wind has longer intermittent waves. It produces constantly for three days, then barely produces for the next three days. However, when it produces, it covers the peak demand around breakfast and dinner time, so it has more advantages than solar energy. The disadvantages of wind turbines include the high initial costs of construction, the substantial surface footprint they occupy, and the carbon emissions associated with producing the concrete and steel towers and the carbon fibre blades. Additionally, the turbines must be dumped or downcycled after a lifespan of 20 to 25 years.
One solution would be to charge consumers an hourly rate based on the spot price at the time of consumption. However, if lawmakers and operators were to change regulations and implement live spot prices for electricity, we would first need to change all the meter devices, which would require intensive and lengthy infrastructure work. This would lead to the immediate collapse of the solar industry and the demise of the narrative that solar energy is the saviour of the energy transition. This is because private solar owners and solar parks would only produce electricity when all other panels are producing, which would make electricity extremely cheap at that specific moment and render past and new solar investments unprofitable. It would also mean huge losses for grid operators who previously guaranteed a purchase price for solar parks over 10 years (long-term contracts) but would now have to sell it to the grid at a low price and make a loss. This is why a minute- or hour-based pricing mechanism has not yet been implemented, being blocked by politics and the narrative of pro-energy transition utopias. In a free economic market, it should be implemented, as it would be fair and send the right signal to consumers to adapt their demand and to producers to find new solutions to cover peak demand.
Solar energy seems like a cheap and valid solution for the global electricity grid at first glance, but in reality, when someone installs solar panels on their roof, in their garden or on their balcony, it actually raises the price of electricity for everyone else.
- Thought experiments on infinite and free renewable energy
Imagine that solar panels cost $0 and were available in unlimited quantities. We ignore the whole issue of raw material supply. Fantastic, right? Well, not really. The solar panels would still work at 20% capacity factor, you wouldn't have any electricity at 10pm. Also, electricity is still mostly 40% of the total energy mix, so in total you would only have 8% of the total energy consumed coming from solar. The other 92% is not affected by this imaginary situation.
Same with windmills, if they were free and unlimited, they would cover 40% efficiency times 40% electricity use = 16% of the total mix.
So in a perfect world of unlimited and free wind and solar, we would only achieve 24% of our zero emissions target because of the intermittency issue. We would still have 76% of the problem unsolved. And I have not mentioned the land footprint, the space required on the ground to install these devices.
Last thought experiment: Imagine that the sun always shines and the wind always blows. Or imagine that we have somehow magically solved the intermittency problem with unlimited batteries, so that all the world's electricity is 100% "renewable" and not generated from fossil fuels. Congratulations! Electricity is finally completely decarbonised. Well, we would only have solved 40% of the problem. The other 60%, used in mining and materials processing, the petrochemical industry, transport, residential and commercial use, are still using fossil fuels. 60% of the problem would still be unresolved.
These thought experiments are certainly not realistic scenarios, but they do show that solar, wind and ESS batteries are not the solution to the decarbonisation and net zero problem. It's too much talk for too small a part of the solution. Yes, solar and wind emit less carbon per kWh of energy produced, as shown in Figure 12A below, but our entire civilisation cannot be powered by 'renewable' energy alone, let alone the electricity grid, which accounts for around 20% of total energy consumption and requires dispatchable sources such as gas, coal, pumped hydro or nuclear.
Figure 12A: Carbon emissions per energy source
Global electricity generation capacity is expected to double between 2020 and 2050, with projections ranging from 1.1TW today in the US to 2.1TW in 2050 and from 2.9TW today in China to 8.7TW in 2050. If installed capacity does indeed double by 2050 as projected, we will need to double the installation of non-intermittent sources such as batteries, hydro, nuclear, gas and coal. And that's going to be a long-term problem: Who wants to go against public perception and sustainability and build a plant that, by design, will not run at full capacity, will only run at peak times, and therefore will not be profitable up to its full potential?
- EROI
Wind turbines and solar panels capture waste energy such as wind and sun, but require much more space to capture very few energy. This means that the material footprint of these 'renewable' devices per unit of energy produced is far greater than the material footprint of baseload energy sources such as nuclear, hydro, gas or coal-fired power stations. The pressure on material and mineral resources to make our society all-electric will be huge, probably about 20 times that of mining as a whole, or in other words, impossible at scale in this century.
EROI stands for Energy Returned On Energy Invested. It is a basic measure of how many units of energy the device or power plant will provide over its lifetime, compared to how many units of energy were used to mine, transform, transport and build the power plant or device. For oil, we started 100 years ago with an EROI of about 100, meaning that for every litre of oil burned to get the rig to drill a hole to extract the oil, we extracted 100 litres of oil. In the 1950s, the EROI dropped to 50. Today, oil has to be pumped deeper, in oil fields that are less pressurised and less easy to extract, or we need unconventional techniques like shale oil fracking to extract oil, so the EROI of oil and gas today is estimated to be around 15 and trending towards 10. Shale oil in the US is only about 5. This means that in the US today you have to burn 20 litres of oil to get 100 litres out, whereas in the 1950s you only had to burn 2 litres. Put another way: To get the same amount of oil, we are now using up the world's oil reserves 5 times faster than we were 100 years ago! At this rate, simply maintaining the total amount of oil available to the economy will require more oil consumption overall, as the EROI decreases over the years.
We estimate the EROI of solar panels to be around 3 to 5 and wind turbines around 7, so it seems we are not going to get better by switching to "renewable" energy. For wind and solar, the EROI is the energy used to mine and process the raw materials and manufacture the solar panels and wind turbine, compared to the total electricity expected to be generated over the lifetime of the device.
EROI is a very imprecise and complicated ratio to calculate, which opens up a philosophical debate about what to include in the EROI ratio and how to estimate it accurately: For oil, should we include oil refining? Should we include the 66% loss through heat dissipation when running a petrol car? For electricity, you can imagine that a PV panel in England will not produce the same energy over 20 years as the same PV panel in the Canary Islands, so what measure should we use for a PV panel? And how do you calculate the energy used to extract the raw material? In each mine you need excavators, water supply, should we count this energy? What about the grid that distributes the electricity, how much of the grid should be allocated to the solar panel? Do you also need to count the gas plant that supplies electricity at night to balance the PV as part of the energy consumed by the solar panel? As you can see, estimating EROI is not an exact science, it is arbitrary, it depends on what factors you take into account. So, depending on which side you are on, the pro- oil & gas side or the pro-renewables side, you can always find a method to prove that your resource is more efficient than the other. What is certain is that solar and wind have low EROIs, well below 10.
One way of resolving the debate would be to look not at the energy provided in litres of oil or kW of electricity, which is a bit like comparing an orange to an apple, but rather at the usable energy for the end user. For a car, whether it has an internal combustion engine or a battery, at the end of the day I want to get from A to B, so we should consider a given distance of travel as the residual energy, so you can compare ICE to EV. And for the energy consumed side of the equation, I would simplify the debate by looking at the total cost invested in dollars, which theoretically includes everything upstream in the supply chain. This would make the comparison between EV and ICE as follows: How much did I pay in total to buy a car and fill it up to drive 150,000km?
- Inefficiency of fossil fuels
I found a very tempting video on YouTube claiming that fossil fuels are inefficient and that renewables are the solution.
Here is a 10 minute video of pro-renewable propaganda misleading the masses.
Although the key message of the video is true, it misses the point and the big picture. Yes, burning fossil fuels is inefficient and 2/3 is lost in heat dissipation. But the missing point is that fossil fuels are so dense and cheap that even if 2/3 is wasted, the remaining 1/3 as usable energy is still very cheap and convenient (easily storable and transportable), so fossil fuels are still a better alternative in most current applications. Also, "renewable" energy requires fossil fuels to be built in the first place, and they are intermittent, so "renewable" energy is also very inefficient in the end.
Let's make an analogy: Suppose you go to a grocery store to buy some apples, and you have a choice between 2 bags of apples. The first bag is marked "a lot of rotten ones inside", costs $3, contains 10 apples, but the retailer claims that 7 of the 10 are rotten, only 3 are edible. This would be the fossil fuel burning analogy. The second bag is labelled "Most of the apples inside are good!", costs $12, contains 10 apples, and the retailer claims that one of the apples is rotten, 9 are edible. This would be the renewable grid analogy, taking into account transformers, DC to AC inverters, transmission lines and expensive fossil fuel back-up systems in standby. Which bag is the most "efficient" or the cheapest for you? In the first bag you get 3 good apples for $3, in the second bag you get 9 good apples for $12, so in the end the second bag is more expensive per eatable apple than the first bag. The moral is: Beware of emotional advertising. What matters is how much useful energy you get for your money. This is what drives markets, businesses and consumers.
Many statements in the video are inaccurate or incomplete or miss the point, and I will dissect the reporter's comments in the video with my own commentary:
0'45"
"We only need to replace one third of fossil fuels"
Yes, that would be true if the alternative energy source was transportable, storable and not intermittent, which it is not. Solar panels have an efficiency of 20 to 25% because they rarely run at full power due to the rising and setting of the sun. Wind turbines are at best 40% efficient because there is not enough wind to get the full intended power from the blades, or too much wind to stop the turbine for safety reasons. So the "renewable" sources are also inefficient, and you would need a huge amount of solar panels and wind turbines to replace the fossil fuel system.
2'48"
"2/3 of energy is wasted"
That's by design, because we BURN fossil fuels, which create heat, and we either use that heat for some application, or we convert some of that heat into pressure and mechanical motion, so yes, obviously there's a loss by all accounts, according to the laws of thermodynamics. If you're using solar panels or wind turbines, you're not burning anything, so you don't have that thermodynamic loss here, but you have a lot of losses all along the process: manufacturing the devices using fossil fuels for the raw materials, transporting those things, converting them to electricity, managing the grid and using another source to cover up the intermittency, and they also run at about a third of their maximum potential capacity, a kind of loss similar to the heat dissipation of fossil fuels. So in the end a lot of energy is used and lost with "renewable" energy.
3'23"
"Our current systems are inefficient"
A world powered by wind and solar and batteries, plus all the derivatives like ammonia and hydrogen, would be even more inefficient if you consider all the losses along the way. For example, a gas or coal-fired power station has a lifespan of over 40 to 60 years and runs 24/7, whereas solar panels and especially windmills have to be completely replaced after 20 to 25 years. it's inefficient.
5'12"
"We have to turn on inefficient coal and gas plants at peak times to meet demand."
That's because wind and solar are unreliable and may not produce at all during peak demand. This statement is utterly hypocritical. We turn to coal and gas plants specifically because renewables are not producing at that particular time, so blaming the efficiency of coal and gas misses the point that renewables are unreliable because of their intermittency. It would be like blaming a replacement guitarist at a gig for not being as good as the original, when the original is at home with a hangover after a party and the show would have been cancelled without the replacement. Don't blame the replacement guitarist, blame the original guitarist's behaviour instead.
6'04"
"80% of a car engine is heat loss"
Yes, but if you replace a 60kg diesel tank with a 400kg battery, you have to carry that 400kg all the way, plus the extra structural reinforcement of the car. Your vehicle is now 1.5 or 2 tonnes instead of 800 kg. A 2 tonnes vehicle carrying an 80kg person is also very inefficient compared to a 15kg bicycle carrying an 80kg person.
6'35"
"Solar and wind do not need to burn anything to produce electricity"
This is the biggest lie in the documentary: No solar panel, windmill or battery can be made without burning fossil fuels. You absolutely need to burn fossil fuels (inefficiently) to get the lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, aluminium and copper of the world to make a 400kg battery for an EV. You have to burn coal or gas to get the silicon needed for the solar panel, and similarly you need rare earths, cement, carbon fibre and other materials to build a windmill, and all these materials need fossil fuels to be mined, processed and refined, and then you need oil to be shipped around the world by cargo ship.
There is no magic engine, electrical device or battery that can be made and exist on electricity alone. In the end you always burn fossil fuel to get anything in our world.
6'46"
"We burn coal that turns a turbine that produces electricity"
Yes, but that's only because the electricity can't be generated by solar and wind at the moment due to intermittency, and can't be backed up by batteries on that scale.
And again, the narrative reduces coal and gas use to the narrow vision of electricity, whereas the majority of gas and coal is used for industrial, commercial and residential purposes, not to produce electricity. and for those applications, such as furnaces and smelters for material and chemical processing, electricity cannot do the job.
If solar and wind could produce 24/7, of course we would use them all the time to generate electricity. Again, you can't blame the grumpy old man for showing up to work when everyone else is at home with a hangover.
6'52"
"We skip the process of burning fossil fuels to go straight to generating electricity"
That's wrong, you have to burn fossil fuels in huge quantities to make the wind turbine in the first place. You can't just compare the operational process, you have to look at the whole life cycle and carbon footprint of the product, from manufacturing, production, distribution and end of life.
7'19"
"Gas stove compared to electric stove"
Yes, it works because you need to heat a cooker to a maximum of 300°C, which is easily done with electricity. But for industrial applications where you need 1500°C, you can't replace fossil fuels with electricity.
7'32"
"With an EV, you use 90% of the energy that comes in"
That's true, and that's the efficiency of a battery, but what about the efficiency of the grid and the electricity generation needed to charge the car? You have losses there. What about charging the EV car over 4 hours instead of 1 minute with petrol, who is willing to wait patiently for 4 hours on a Monday at 8am ?
9'02"
"If we shift our attention away from what we put in and what we get out"
You have to look at what you have to put in to electrify this world. We would need an order of magnitude of 3 to 30 times more metals, materials and minerals to dig out of the ground to get there, which is unrealistic, irresponsible, environmentally suicidal and fossil fuel intensive.
9'06"
"Switching to renewables gives us a lot more bang for our buck"
Oil and gas are extremely dense and cheap, so even if there's 2/3 of losses, the 1/3 output is still very economically competitive. there's a lot of reasons why we still use 80% of fossil fuels in our society, one of them is that this energy is dense, cheap, abundant, easily transportable, easily storable and usable on demand. That's a lot of advantages and benefits that electrification can't compete with.
9'11"
"Electrification makes the things we do less energy intensive in the first place"
Well, again, if you look at the whole life cycle, from raw materials to manufacturing, transporting wind and solar, upgrading the grid, storage, backup sources for peak hours and end-of-life treatment, I can guarantee you that solar and wind are not energy efficient at all.
In conclusion, regarding the claim that fossil fuels are inefficient, why is the total share of energy from wind and solar power insignificant and growing at a much slower rate than oil, gas and coal? Figure 13A below shows the evolution of total energy consumption per source. Wind (purple), solar (yellow), nuclear (orange) and other renewable energies (red) are not growing much compared to the three fossil fuel sources.
Figure 13A: Total energy consumption per source type over the last 200 years
It can't be the result of lobbying by one company, bribery of one politician or lobbying by one country. The same trend has been evident for 200 years all over the world: fossil fuel consumption is growing, and no other source is even scratching its dominance. Perhaps fossil fuels are the most efficient and cheapest source of energy after all, and humanity has very good reasons to use them.
- Other renewable energy sources
I will quickly look at the pros and cons of other non-fossil energy sources.
Hydropower
PROS = very efficient, small material footprint, small land footprint, can be turned on and off at will, extremely long life, zero carbon emissions.
CONS = severely affects the biosphere downstream due to river flow stoppage and upstream due to flood, very limited growth potential as most viable sites already have hydro installed, risk of rare but devastating and deadly impact if the dam collapses.
Hydropower is fine for low population densities and regions with lots of mountains like Sweden and Norway, but has limited capacity in flat countries like Germany. All the rivers and lakes in Europe are already close to their maximum hydropower capacity. There is not much remaining growth available. There is also a problem with the underwater fauna: sediments and fish are trapped at the dam, disturbing the ecosystem. But otherwise it is the best source of electricity, reliable, powerful and easy to turn on and off.
Nuclear power
PROS = Insanely dense energy, low material footprint, low land footprint, zero carbon emissions, safety (yes, safety is a pro, not a con), baseload power 24/7.
CONS = Requires highly skilled labour, waste management, capital intensive, long payback period, not designed for turning up or down the power output, requires stable government and population support.
Nuclear power has many advantages in terms of space requirements, energy density, 24/7 base load power. The biggest disadvantages are not really the safety risk (the safety level in the nuclear industry is insanely high), nor the waste management. The amount of highly radioactive waste is very limited: all of France's highly radioactive waste from the last 50 years can be stored in a single Olympic swimming pool. And for all the other less radioactive waste, in the worst case, if no treatment is possible or practical, all the waste can be dumped in a hole for 1000 years.
In fact, the fatality rate in the history of nuclear energy is lower than that of any other energy source except solar power. As shown in Figure 14A below, coal, oil, gas and hydropower have caused more fatal accidents per unit of energy produced.
Figure 14A: Death rate for each energy source per unit of energy produced
The biggest problem with nuclear power is its financing and deployment time. You have to spend $3 to $10 billion up front, and you start getting revenue 10 years after the project starts. That is why no private company will invest in building a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can only be managed on a state level, with public money. Nobody can spend that much money at 4% interest and never see any revenue for the first 10 years. Nuclear investment can only be public, by the government, unless we are talking about SMRs (Small Modular Reactors), which are mini nuclear plants that can be manufactured in a dedicated serial manufacturing facility and then installed on site like any other industrial product.
For the same GW of power output, a nuclear power plant is about 4 times cheaper to build in China or South Korea than in Europe or the US, a massive difference that cannot be explained by labour costs alone: Europe has become a bureaucracy of redundant and restrictive regulations, extra cautious on safety regulations, making any new industrial project more expensive to build due to extra safety measures and protections. China also builds dozens of units of the same design, which reduces development and construction costs at scale, compared to Europe, which builds one or a few reactors of a different design for each project and country. If you have no standard design and no economies of scale, then every nuclear reactor is a prototype, and so the construction delays and cost overruns will always occur, giving the nuclear industry a bad reputation and discouraging any new investor or government decision. Who in Europe would be stupid enough to decide to build a new nuclear reactor when the last 20 years have shown that it usually takes 7 extra years more than originally expected and double the original price? Then it is a vicious circle: No one trusts the nuclear industry to deliver 30 new reactors on time and on budget, which should be Europe's strategy for 2040 and beyond to electrify, decarbonise and replace the old nuclear fleet.
Unfortunately, governments change every 5 years, which makes any long-term vision very difficult. You cannot start a nuclear programme, then stop it 10 years later, then start it again 10 years after that. Nuclear needs decades of stability and public money up front, which is not really available these days.
The loss of skills due to the very few new nuclear plants built since 1990, the lack of long-term vision to plan many nuclear plants and benefit from economies of scale to build several plants of the same design, the high regulatory constraints and extra safety measures imposed on European constructors, and labour costs make the European and US nuclear industry much more expensive than the Asian nuclear industry, as shown in Figure 14B below.
Figure 14B: Average cost of new nuclear power per country
At around 10 billion dollars total cost and over an eight-year construction period, a nuclear power plant comes down to about 15 to 20 cents per kWh. This is double or triple the price of 4 to 9 kWh from a gas- or coal-fired power plant, or from wind or solar power with batteries.
Nuclear power boomed worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s, and we are still benefiting from these energy sources today. Unfortunately, since the 1990s there has been quite a slowdown in the construction of new nuclear power plants. As you can see in Figure 14C below, from 1990 to 2024 there have been about as many new nuclear plant openings as closures, and from 2025 to 2040 we expect to see more closures than openings because of the 50-60 year lifespan of nuclear plants.
To understand the scale of the need for nuclear power that we would need: For the US to go from currently 20% baseload to 70% baseload on the US grid, we would need to build 30 nuclear power plants every year for the next 15 years. To put that in context, the US has built about 30 power plants in the last 25 years, and we would need that number every year from 2025 to 2040 for nuclear to become the baseload of electricity to replace coal and gas, and that's just for the US. A nuclear power plant costs about $3-10 billion and takes about 10 years to build.
The scale of the need shows that nuclear alone can't be the answer. Any future nuclear additions, whether SMRs (Small Modular Reactor) or regular-sized plants, will be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, given that some old nuclear plants will have to be decommissioned in the 2040s and 2050s, and considering that total electricity demand is expected to grow by 30% over the next 20 years. Coal and gas-fired power stations will continue to be added to the mix faster and bigger than the nuclear additions. Even if nuclear plants were three times cheaper and faster to build, nuclear power would grow only marginally compared to total US electricity demand, and I consider here USA because this would be one of the the best candidate to expand its nuclear fleet, along with France, Russia and China.
As shown on Figure 14D below, there will be no nuclear 'renaissance' over the next 10 years, with a net decline in nuclear power generation expected overall. Although China, India and Russia are leading the way with new construction underway or planned, new deployment will not offset the closure of all the old plants in Europe, and it will certainly not keep pace with the accelerating demand for electricity from AI data centres and the electrification of things like electric cars.
Figure 14D: Projected nuclear power plant openings and closures
The five biggest nuclear energy producing countries are the USA, France, China, Russia and South Korea. As can be seen in Figure 14E below, only China is massively growing its fleet of nuclear energy producers in the 2020s. Other countries with growing fleets are India and Turkey, the latter uses Russian technology and operator.
Figure 14E: Countries committed to nuclear power in the past and in the 2020s
As a result, since 2000, many countries have experienced a stall or even a decline in nuclear power electricity production. Only India, South Korea, Russia and, to a much greater extent, China are driving the so-called 'nuclear renaissance', which is not actually happening, as shown in Figure 14F below. The nuclear renaissance is a chinese renaissance, but China is also experiencing a boom in coal, solar, wind and battery, not only a nuclear boom. Also, most nuclear reactors built in the 1980s and 1990s will reach the end of their 60-year lifespan in the 2040s and 2050s. This will remove a significant proportion of baseload from the grid and endanger grid stability further if solar and wind power become dominant by then. It will also force countries to build new coal- and gas-fired power plants, which have low capex and lower construction time, to compensate for the retiring nuclear plants.
Figure 14F: Nuclear energy production per country since 1965
The bottom line is that nuclear plants cost 5 to 15 billion to build and 6 to 15 years before you get your first return on investment. No private investor is willing to invest that much money and wait that long for the first return, so nuclear is only manageable at the public state level. Politicians have no interest in spending money and letting their successors reap the rewards, because none of today's leaders will be around in 10 years' time. No one would remember that a booming economy today is actually the result of politicians' decisions 10 to 15 years ago. Politicians want short-term results so they can reap the benefits and get re-elected. Only countries with stable leaders over decades like Russia or China have a growing nuclear industry today. France and the USA, the other 2 nuclear superpowers, have too much political turmoil and change of direction at the top, no one stays at the reins of power long term. And the nations have too much debt these days that public financing of such a long-term industry is extremely costly and there is simply no room for extra investment budgets.
And that's the real reason why the nuclear industry has been in decline for the last 25 years. It's not the technology, it's not the risks, it's not the price of the electricity that comes out, it's not the citizens for or against it. The real reason for the decline of nuclear power is that it has become almost impossible for most countries to finance it.
China and Russia are building 70% of all nuclear power plants under construction today. They are the driving force behind nuclear power today. Not the US and not Europe. It's no coincidence: These are the two countries with the most stable and longest serving governors, which allows for long-term planning.
Nuclear energy currently accounts for only 4% of the world's total electricity production. Even if all the new nuclear reactors currently planned are built, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that nuclear power will still only account for 5% of the world's total electricity by 2050: From 10,000 GW of total electrical capacity in 2025 to a projected 20,000 GW in 2050, solar, wind and gas-fired power plants are expected to account for the majority of the growth.
In the USA, 18% of electricity currently comes from nuclear power, and 10 new reactors are expected to come online by 2050. However, if total US consumption increases from approximately 4 TWh in 2025 to 6 TWh in 2050, as projected, the share of nuclear power is expected to decline from 18% to 11%, as gas, wind, and solar power are expected to dominate.
The USA has not built any new nuclear power stations in the last 25 years. As shown in Figure 14G below, even if the proclaimed 'renaissance' of nuclear power were to suddenly kick in and the USA were to start building five new nuclear reactors per year from 2030 onwards, the total electrical output of the nuclear fleet would only grow by 50% between now and 2050. This would account for an additional capacity of only 10% of the current national electricity production capacity. It's good to have, but it doesn't really move the needle significantly.
Figure 14G: Best case of US nuclear ramp-up is almost irrelevant
In 2024, 7GW of nuclear plants entered construction in China. Over the same period, 94 GW of coal power plants entered construction. Although China is sometimes described as a leader in solar, wind and nuclear installations, when we put the numbers in perspective, it is clear that China is still powered mostly by coal, even in terms of newly installed capacity over the last few years.
A large-scale nuclear renaissance will not happen; nuclear power will remain marginal and insignificant, although necessary. Nuclear is simply too slow and too costly to ramp-up. This is not due to the technology itself which is very mature and safe, but rather to the high costs and long construction times that make any project extremely difficult to finance, unless states are fully involved and prepared to absorb losses for years. This proves difficult in an era of instability and rapid changes in governance and geopolitics.
Nuclear power has many advantages, such as constant and reliable energy, extremely dense, low material footprint, low space footprint, constant baseload... but it has 2 major weaknesses: it costs billions to build a nuclear power plant, and it takes years, sometimes a decade, to build it. The nature of capitalist investment and the short cycles of politics make it very difficult to finance, both for the private sector and now also for the public sector due to high debt and public deficits, with more spending on social spending for an ageing population to appease the crowd rather than on a project that will see its first return in 10 years.
Nuclear fusion, the next nuclear technology after today's fission, is at least two decades away from scaling up to commercial production, and by then we will need much more electricity than we do today. Even if fusion works and is commercialised, it will be like today's fission technology: It will never grow fast enough to take over a significant share of electricity production, let alone replace burning fossil fuels for industrial applications, because of the long lead time and large up-front capital requirements.
The hope for a nuclear renaissance after 2030 is to develop and deploy the fourth generation of nuclear reactors, which encompasses various new technologies under the umbrella of "4th generation":
- Breeder reactors consume waste from current reactors.
- Fast neutron reactors, which consume all isotopes of uranium and avoid the concentration and enrichment phase, multiplying the availability of uranium feedstock by a factor of 50.
- Molten salt is used as a fluid fuel instead of solid rods of enriched uranium to avoid downtime for reloading fuel and to ensure natural safety in the event of overheating or overpressure.
- Thorium is used as a combustible source instead of uranium.
- SMRs (small modular reactors) are faster to build off-site, scalable and suitable for smaller-scale applications.
Currently, most installed reactors are of the second and third generation, using only uranium-235, which is found on Earth at a concentration of 0.7%, compared to 99.3% for uranium-238, which is not used in fuel rods today. Fourth-generation technology would be able to consume uranium-238, thus eliminating the cost of uranium enrichment that increases the concentration of uranium-235 in fuel rods from 0.7% to about 4%. This would mean that we suddenly have 100 times more fuel available in the Earth's crust if we can also use uranium-238.
Another fourth-generation technology is the use of thorium molten salt reactors. These are much safer and potentially more cost-efficient. They have a longer plant lifetime and thorium is three times more abundant than uranium. There is no downtime to replace the fuel and thorium waste decays 100 times faster than uranium waste. These are all very promising technologies.
To tackle the huge costs and deployment times of current 800 MW nuclear reactors, we could use 100 MW SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) and scale up to reduce costs and production lead times.
There are definitely plenty of exciting opportunities for nuclear power to experience a renaissance and become the new trend of the 2030s and 2040s, replacing the current trend of 'renewable' solar and wind power.
Geothermal
PROS = truly sustainable source, available literally anywhere in the world.
CONS = quite expensive to set up, output is only low temperature heat (below 300°C), limited application like domestic heating, difficult to ramp up and scale, risks of earthquake and cracks on the surface.
Geothermal energy is either physically difficult to access due to the need to drill deep enough to reach high temperatures, or it is economically unviable because drilling that deep is very expensive and the energy return is quite poor. We are talking about geothermal wells with a depth of 200 metres for commercial and residential heating, but for power generation, the depth ranges from 500 to 5,000 metres.
Another thing to mention is the risks involved: As with oil and gas drilling, drilling can cause earthquakes, and geothermal wells can generate cracks in local residents' roads and houses.
I believe geothermal will expand in the coming decades, but its low energy density limits its application and scale of use, as the highest temperature you can get is around 300°C, which is not high enough and suitable for most industrial applications. We probably need technological innovation and progress to increase the current 0.3% share of the world's energy sources that geothermal energy accounts for.
Geothermal energy is only economically viable in certain areas of the world with abundant heat sources in the ground, such as Iceland, which has turned this resource into a cheap and abundant and constant source of electricity and has used it for large-scale aluminium production.
Overall, very few regions of the world have a hot source beneath the earth's surface, so the use of geothermal energy is drastically limited to specific regions such as New Zealand or Iceland.
Geothermal energy needs another breakthrough to have a significant impact on the energy landscape.
Battery Energy Stationary Storage System (BESS)
PROS = scalable, no carbon emission, low surface footprint, relatively cheap
CONS = only a storage solution, not an energy generation. Short duration of storage only, with max 6 hours discharge time per battery.
BESS stands for Battery Energy Stationary Storage. These are large batteries, the size of a cargo container, connected to the grid and able to store electricity when there is an excess of supply over demand, and able to return electricity to the grid when there is a shortage of supply over demand. BESS typically discharges from 100% to 0% in 2 to 6 hours, so it can't be used for long periods like hydro or gas.
Total world electricity production in 2023 is about 80,000 GWh per day. We can make assumptions about how much battery storage we would need to run fully on a solar+wind+battery system, with nuclear and hydro as a bonus. Opinions vary from a low case scenario of 6 hours of storage to cover morning and evening peaks (this is for sunny days), or a medium case scenario of 3 days of storage (in case of long periods without wind), to a high case scenario of 2 months of storage (long winter in northern Europe with almost no sunshine and many days without wind).
Even if we take the most conservative approach and the easiest achievable target of 6 hours of battery storage, we would need 20,000Gwh of battery storage on the grid worldwide (80,000GWh for 1 day, that's 20,000Gwh needed for 6 hours).
Worldwide BESS installation is growing very fast at +50% per year since 2020, but it is still only 200 GWh installed in 2024, 100 times less than our target of 20,000 GWh. This means that to cover just 6h of the world's electricity storage capacity with BESS, we would need 100 years of grid BESS installation as in 2024! As you can see, the scale of the need is so huge that any progress we make in installing BESS will not even scratch the surface of the need. And that's just the lower scenario of 6 hours of storage. If you wanted to achieve 3 days of electricity storage in BESS, you would need 1200 years of battery installation, as in 2024. Yes, it would take a long time.
Hydrogen
PROS = energy storage, many applications in transport and industry
CONS = very inefficient, large material footprint, difficult to store and transport
E-fuels / Synthetic fuels
PROS = Like oil but does not come from fossil fuels
CONS = Very inefficient, expensive and not possible to produce on a large scale
E-fuels, also known as synthetic fuels, are liquid fuels that do not come from fossil energy sources. E-fuels are produced through a chemical process by capturing CO2 from the air and combining it with nitrogen or green hydrogen produced by electrolysis from renewable electrical sources, with the aim of producing hydrocarbons and end products such as e-methane (synthetic natural gas), liquid synthetic fuels such as e-methanol, e-diesel or e-kerosene, or SAF jet fuel (sustainable aviation fuel).
Figure 15A: E-fuels production process and use
This process is extremely energy-intensive, requiring 10 times more electricity to produce eFuel to drive a given distance than to drive the same distance in an EV.
In terms of global volumes, the best-case scenario is for eFuel production to be 0.1% of current fossil fuel oil production by 2035, so eFuel is nowhere near ready to replace traditional oil consumption, even for niche applications such as aviation jet fuel or marine kerosene.
How arrogant is humanity? How can anyone really believe that a metal complex giant plant that absorbs CO2 from the air can one day be carbon negative, taking into account the carbon footprint to build that CCS plant? People just have too much ego and believe in fairy tales. Forests and oceans are simply the best carbon sequestration technology. Anything else is just tech commercial propaganda.
The only viable application of CCS is to place such a system directly at the exit of a coal-fired power station. This is already the case in most of the new coal-fired power stations in China. But this technology is very expensive to build and reduces the power output of the plant by about 30% because the CCS system itself needs energy to operate.
CCS is just a human invention to avoid our responsibility to consume and produce less in order to continue growing and emmiting, so we avoid restrictions and avoid reducing consumption. But in terms of physics, this is pure madness. Nature is much better equipped to capture CO2. Just let the grass and trees grow, it is as simple as that.
Carbon capture is like trying to turn cheese into a cow or a chocolate cake into raw flour, eggs, cacao beans and milk. It simply goes against the principles of physics.
However, CCS is now an integral part of the IPCC report, presented as a solution to achieving net zero by 2050. This suggests that politicians have heavy influenced the IPCC study to avoid general panic, avoid putting world leaders on the hot seat and maintain a fossil fuel-based society, while also providing the population with false hope and keeping anger over climate concerns in check. It also indicates indirectly that there is no solution to reducing our emissions that would be agreed by industry, politicians and citizens. Nobody is willing to make tremendous sacrifices to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions. If CCS is retained as a solution, this would be an admission of helplessness and powerlessness, a sign of surrendering to the reality that we are bound to continue emitting carbon as long as humans and fossil fuels both exist.
Now compare CCS with fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal):
Fossil fuels AKA oil, gas and coal
PROS = extremely energy dense, small material footprint, small land footprint, easy to store, easy to transport, extremely cheap, very abundant so far, can be turned on and off quickly on demand.
CONS = limited sourcing areas, emits carbon dioxyde. That's literally the only 2 problems, otherwise it would be the perfect energy source.
It's easy to understand why humanity developed extremely slowly for centuries until 1800 in terms of GDP, standard of living, purchasing power, technologies, innovations, and experienced a massive exponential boom in the 19th and especially the 20th century. Everything is linked to the usage of coal, oil and natural gas.
Conversely, it is easy to imagine a world suddenly deprived of fossil fuels, either voluntarily or through natural depletion: We would suddenly deal with all the problems described in the "PROS", taking us back to the pre-industrial age.
- Conclusion
As with most things in life, when it comes to energy, there are no easy answers, only trade-offs. Every fuel used to power modern life has a combination of attributes, some of which are more desirable than others. Coal, for example, is cheap and plentiful, but it burns dirty. Natural gas is virtually free in some regions, but it is difficult to transport and some people object to the fact that it is a hydrocarbon. Oil is a dense, transportable and versatile resource, but it is also a hydrocarbon emmiting carbon dioxyde and is often sourced from dangerous or unstable regions. Wind and solar power may reduce carbon emissions, but they are intermittent and increase the cost of running grids. Hydroelectric power is a dispatchable, carbon-free source, but it is a technology that requires a massive amount of concrete, has directly caused tens of thousands of deaths, and has also reshaped vast areas of pristine nature and displaced millions of people from their ancestral lands. Geothermal energy has limited scaling potential because most of the accessible Earth's crust is not warm enough to generate sufficient energy. Enriched uranium, the fuel that comes closest to perfection, has an extremely high density, but carries concerns about nuclear waste and reactor meltdown risk that are both artificial and amplified, as well as long and high upfront costs before a return on investment is achieved.
The biggest optimists will say that in 2100 all our energy will be electrified based on pure renewables and so we will leave fossil fuels in the ground. We will have a circular economy and stop mining altogether. Robots and AI will make up for the declining population. Debt is virtual, not linked to physical reality and we will keep printing money and carry on as we are. In reality, it is more likely that you will win the lottery than that this dream world will come to fruition in the second half of the century.
These people are ideologists, ignorant, unaware of reality.
"Renewable" energy like solar panels and wind turbines are not renewable. They are rebuildable.
There's never been a solar panel made without burning fossil fuels.
There's never been a microchip made without burning fossil fuel.
There's never been steel or concrete made on a commercial scale without burning fossil fuels.
"Renewable" energy is not renewable. An energy system completely decoupled from fossil fuels is not realistic due to the unthinkable amount of material and space we would need to produce and store electricity.
There may not be a single good or service in the industrialised world that does not require fossil fuels for its production, distribution and consumption. All our idealistic visions of a perfect world are just a pipe dream that gives us hope but disconnects us from reality.
Intermittent renewables make grids more expensive and less reliable, pushing up prices for consumers and increasing the risk of blackouts.
Also, since demand fluctuates hourly and supply and demand must match constantly on an electrical grid, a large amount of dispatchable electricity is required on the grid, which can be turned on and off at any moment. Consequently, no large industrial country in the world has an annual total electricity consumption of less than 50% from dispatchable sources (nuclear, coal, gas, batteries and hydropower combined). Due to their intermittency, solar and wind power can account for a maximum of 50% of a country's electricity consumption, regardless of the amount of installed capacity. The only exceptions are small, low-intensity countries close to the equator (Like Canary Islands) or particular windy areas of the world (like Denmark). However, in any large industrial country, the penetration of wind and solar power cannot exceed 50%.
The more intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar power, you have on the grid, the more dispatchable sources, such as coal- and gas-fired power plants, you need to cover intermittency and secure backup energy. Increasing the amount of solar and wind energy on the grid makes it more dependent on gas and coal. While batteries can provide some support during peak hours, they cannot scale up to meet full peak demand and are not a long-term storage solution for winter or Dunkelflaute periods of several days. Nuclear power stations are designed to provide constant baseload; they are not intended to manage the ups and downs of the intermittent power supply of wind and solar. Nuclear and intermittent renewables are incompatible when one or the other (or both) is built on a large scale.
Given that Europe imports 90% of its hydrocarbons, making energy security a major weakness, and considering that global warming is caused, in part, by the burning of fossil fuels, Europe has embarked on a moral journey to achieve net zero by 2050, regardless of the consequences or the technical feasibility. This foolish insistence on a 'green' transition without reassessing the results has made the European grid more reliant on gas and coal, increased overall consumer prices, and made Europe totally dependent on LNG imports and the supply chain for key materials and solar panels from China. Europe is losing on all fronts: energy sucurity, supply chain sovereignity and consumer price.
While the transition to renewable energy sources can work in some places, such as Australia, Denmark, Brazil, the Canary Islands and Norway, due to their natural abundance of wind, solar power, rivers and mountains, for the vast majority of industrialised countries, the electric grid relies on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, there is no clean alternative to powering our modern civilisation.
People are blind to reality, ignorant of supply and demand, misinformed, falsely optimistic, full of psychological biases. Sunlight is free, but electricity generated from sunlight, which is available 24/7 and can be adjusted to meet demand at any time, is extremely expensive or actually impossible to produce on a large and reliable scale.
In any industry, if you want to develop a new technology, you start by developing it in the laboratory. If it works, you build a small-scale pilot project. If you can generate a viable product, tehn you build a commercial-size plant and try to reduce the cost per unit. If your product sells well, you can then scale up to larger commercial factories to reduce the production cost per unit further. At every stage, the technology must pass the small-scale test before moving to the next stage. When it comes to renewables, not a single village of 1,000 inhabitants in the world runs fully on wind, solar and batteries all year long, yet we are pretending to deploy this new grid on a national scale without any small-scale demonstrators. This is pure fantasy and propaganda, and is driven by the agendas of politicians and some unscrupulous energy companies who generate profits at the expense of the end consumer's energy bill.
One solution would be to go back to life in the 60s and 70s and drastically reduce our production and consumption, but that is impossible now because of debt and lack of labour. Even if you imagine that AI robots will do a lot of work for us, these robots need a lot of energy consumption and those robots would not consumes goods or services, nor pay taxes to fund the public welfare system. We will discuss GDP and debt in more detail, as well as AI and robots, in other chapters.
In general, I don't trust the mainstream media. In fact, I tend to believe the opposite of whatever propaganda is in the news. My message here is: Don't trust one-sided statements. Get scientific evidence. Ask questions about the big picture and the unspoken nature of things. What you see or read or hear is not necessarily what you get. Things that look wonderful with all the pros and no apparent cons always have a catch.
We are sold the idea of 'renewable' energies as having only positives, so it is obvious that we should build more of them to solve whatever problem. We are only shown one side of the coin: no emissions during operation, cheap electricity when they produce, and the ability to make anyone independent and energy sovereign. But nobody talks about the negatives:
'Renewable' energy makes the grid more complex, less reliable and more expensive. Intermittency means we will always need backup production, so we have to install two systems, which increases consumer costs. Solar panels and wind turbines do not solve our dependency on fossil fuels because they still require coal and gas to be produced. The more solar and wind power there is on the grid, the more it pushes away coal, gas and nuclear power production, making those sources more expensive per unit produced and resulting in higher overall consumer costs. 90% of the solar panel manufacturing supply chain is based in China, meaning that any nation that deploys solar energy becomes dependent on China, cancelling out the idea of energy sovereignty. The space and material footprint of "renewable" energy sources is much bigger than that of traditional coal, gas or nuclear power plants.
It's never black or white with any technology. There are always some positives and some negatives. Any change from one technology to another simply involves swapping some advantages and disadvantages for others.
A fossil fuel free world is a long way off to be diplomatic, or a huge pipe dream to be realistic.
Over the past 40 years, the world has invested some $6 trillion in 'renewables', and as a result we have managed to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels from 85% to just 81%! If the goal was to move away from fossil fuels, then the strategy has emphatically and empirically failed. Fossil fuels are not going away any time soon. Renewables have added to the mix, while fossil fuels have grown even more over the same period.
Take a look at the picture above. These are wind turbines at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. We had windmills and watermills 150 years ago, the technology was known and used. It is a very old technology. Why do you think they all disappeared until recently with the installation of modern wind turbines? It's because they became inefficient after the industrial revolution compared to steam engines, coal burning machines, and even more expensive and inefficient after the use of oil engines in the late 19th century. We moved away from the old renewable sources for a good reason: fossil fuel burning machines were better for the economy and for the human thirst for a more comfortable world of materials and services. To think that we could go back entirely to windmills and water turbines (hydroelectric) and solar panels to power our civilisation is ludicrous, utopian and foolish.
The physics of energy matter. Renewables are promising, but they lack the density, storage and infrastructure to replace fossil fuels on a political timetable. Relying on wind and solar for energy security without a reliable baseload (fossil or nuclear) is energy idealism - and in the real world, idealism doesn't keep the lights on.
Scaling up wind and solar requires massive investment in grids, storage and minerals such as lithium, cobalt and copper. Energy security is at odds with globalised renewable energy supply chains. Countries trading oil and gas dependence for Chinese solar panels, battery components and processed materials are simply trading one dependency for another.
Climate policy and the European political agenda identified carbon emissions as the problem, promised an unrealistic clean transition and sold the idea that we could decarbonise without simplifying our systems, without major constraints, and without compromising our quality of life. This approach was naïve and simplistic. We try to solve the climate crisis in a way that avoids the fundamental questions about planetary limits, how we like to live within restrictions on consumption, and without asking what kind of future we are actually heading towards. We want to fix the atmosphere while preserving civilisation. But that’s not how systems work.
Fossil fuels became the villain, CO₂ emissions the metric, and renewables the saviour. Any serious reckoning with energy, complexity, ecological limits or human behaviour was missing. If fossil fuels caused the problem, then renewables must solve it. End of discussion. But the real story is more complicated. Modern civilisation is built on fossil fuels. They are not just a by-product of progress; they are its driving force. After World War II in particular, oil, coal and gas fuelled everything: industrial expansion, population growth, military power and the rise of global trade. The abundance of cheap energy made complexity affordable and growth appear infinite. Fighting climate change and CO₂ emissions means fighting against the core of our civilisation: a 24/7 abundance of machinery for global extraction, transport, manufacturing, construction and trades, as well as robots that assist in our daily lives and provide comfort, welfare and a high standard of living.
'Renewable' energy is not the solution because fossil fuels are not the problem. The problem lies in human nature: our insatiable desire for more while doing less effort, and never imposing constraints or restrictions on our consumption. Fossil fuels are the solution to human endeavour, not the problem. Climate change is an external cost that comes with them.
The net-zero narrative simply soothes fears that humans are polluting the world to the point of self-destruction with an idealistic vision of a renewable-powered society that is not realistic. Renewable energy cannot power our civilisation. One will have to go: Renewable energy sources or our current civilisation. I'll take bets on both going away.
############################
If you enjoyed this content, please do me a favour: Spread the word and tell people around you about my online book. Thank you for sharing!
.svg.png){kind=icon}
- THE LAST DECADE -
December 2025
Comments
Post a Comment