Denial concerning Technological Solutions.

This is part three of climate action denial.

Part one...Introduction

Part two....Denial of the science of climate change.

Is there a technological solution to decarbonise energy use?

This is an important worthwhile question to ask but there are different ways this question is used as a form of denial of the need to tackle the problems of greenhouse gas emissions. One way is to deny that there are effective technologies that exist that can replace fossil fuels for energy and another is that we should wait until some new technology appears. Of course both have the same intention...... And that is to prevent action being taken.

Of course there are technologies that exist that could replace fossil fuels and have been shown to be effective but the important questions are how quickly can we do this, how much energy (rate) can we achieve and how can we deal with problems of intermittency if we rely on wind and solar energy? (I will briefly consider some of these issues on intermittency in this post below).

 If the alternatives can’t replace fossil fuels then the logical conclusion is that human civilisation can’t be maintained and the contrarians who express this are expressing not just considerably more alarm but also hopelessness than those who they often derogatively call alarmists. We know ultimately that human civilisation will need to decouple energy usage from net carbon emissions either because of the climate impact or because of the finite nature of fossil fuels which ever we come to realize first. Most climate scientists, and lately supported by the governor of the bank of England (at a world bank seminar), believe that most of the known world reserves are deemed unburnable if we are to stay within the 2C limits agreed at the climate Paris conference 2015.

It is not known whether or not we can achieve this decoupling at a fast enough rate to avoid serious climatic impacts by staying within the 2C limits agreed at the Paris COP 21 talks by political world leaders at the end of 2015. With this uncertainty it is logical that we should take the path to urgently decarbonise as is technologically feasible. The longer we procrastinate the more difficult it will be to decarbonise as world growth and hence world energy use grows. Ultimately this inaction would lead to a time whereby creating the necessary infrastructure (with its energy demands) to maintain human civilisation would become impossible.

It is fair to say that fossil fuels have been a major contributor to the growth in both prosperity and world population. Our understanding on these resources has also, for some considerable time, included the facts that not only are these resources finite but they have serious environmental impacts. Used sensibly with adequate planning and foresight these resources could be (or better still could have been) used as a stepping platform to a sustainable future. Not doing so is a reckless gamble. The gamble becomes more reckless and more difficult to solve the longer we leave it.

Intermittency problems with renewables.

This is a topic that deserves a separate detailed discussion but a very brief overview of how this issue has been used to promote action denial is worth describing. One way is to confuse predictability with the intermittency issue and the other way is to argue that the intermittency issue is unsolvable, or that the intermittency issue will become more problematic when we rely fully on alternatives.

The intermittency issue can be reduced considerably and eventually eliminated by a combination of strategies used in parallel:-

a) Have a combination of different resources depending on location such as on shore wind, off shore wind, solar, geothermal, wave, tidal, geothermal, hydro and biomass.

b) Share energy over larger regions using high voltage direct current transmission lines which considerably reduce transmission costs when transmitting over large distances.

c) Make the grid “smarter” by matching demand with supply where possible.

d). Develop different storage techniques that can then deliver the stored energy almost immediately. Examples here could be pumped hydroelectric, battery storage or synthetic fuels.  

As an aside an example here could be useful, although how new innovative use of technology will eventually pan out often leads in unexpected directions. Further an example can illustrate how relying fully on alternatives in the future can actually help reduce some of the variability problems of supply and demand. Imagine parked cars around the world with many of them connected to the grid. The owners merely state (electronically) the time they might next need to drive the car and the battery is used at the convenience of the grid to store or charge with the owner being paid or charged accordingly. This smart use of storage alone may in many locations solve the intermittency problem.  Even without smart technology cars will generally be charging at times when other demand is low but the supply of wind overnight or peak sunshine during midday is high.

The idea that wind and solar are necessarily more unpredictable than say a large conventional power station is a myth. Unpredictability of energy can be due to weather or plant failure. The unpredictably due to weather will not likely affect the conventional power plant but plant failure is of much greater concern. If a conventional power plant fails then that will represent a much higher proportion of the supply than the failure of a wind turbine say. It can be seen that predicting exactly where rain will fall or clouds cover the sky can be problematic but when we look at average sunshine or wind patterns over an entire region then we see that these are very predictable over many hours with enough time to plan accordingly.

An over reliance on a technological fix.

Finally it is important to address another viewpoint on technological solutions that can prevent enough action being taken that I will come back to on a future post regarding our attitudes to growth. This is the view that there must be a technological fix no matter what energy demands we make globally. Before dealing with this in later posts I will discuss (in the next post) denial of political ways to allow efficient action on climate change by political extremism or ideology.

Next:-

Denial of political pathways.