The attached pdf was sent to me by someone that reads my emails. It discusses how Chemical Companies in Europe are trying to get to net zero but can’t because of a lack of green hydrogen and a lack of green energy needed to make the green hydrogen.
Electrolysis used to make hydrogen is about 80% efficient meaning that 20% of the energy from the source (solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors) is lost making it. Further, the amount of fossil fuel combustion used in these processes is far beyond the capability of renewables to replace.
I gave an example in an earlier email that Germany is building 12.5 Gigawatts of natural gas generation that is designed to burn hydrogen at a later date. To provide hydrogen for those plants at only a 30% hydrogen, 70% natural gas mixture will take as many renewables as currently exists in Germany that took 25 years to build.
The mandates being imposed by the EU, including adding a carbon tax on all imported chemicals to the EU to adjust for the higher cost of EU chemicals will just kill European business and have little to no net effect on global emission. As products in the EU will have higher raw material costs, production will move out of the EU and it will leave the citizens of the EU unemployed and unable to pay the carbon taxes being imposed upon all of the imports. Businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to their share holders and they will not go bankrupt to support the EU’s plan which is unachievable based upon the numbers in bold italics below. They will just move production to the third world, India, or China there there are less stringent requirements..
The EU will be killing their economy with no net carbon reductions.
From the article in italics:
ELECTRIFICATION IS KEY
Chemical companies like BASF aren’t the only ones looking to renewable energy to help transition to net zero. Most every other heavy industry in Europe sees green electricity as the answer to its GHG problems, but that electricity is still mostly an ambition.
“The way to achieve net zero is—simply speaking—electrification,” Accenture’s Elser says. “What appears to be missing at the moment is sufficient renewable or net-zero electricity at competitive prices.” Generating all the clean energy required by European industry will require an additional 836 average-size nuclear plants, solar panels covering an area the size of Ireland, or onshore wind turbines covering an area the size of Spain, according to Accenture’s analysis.
Where are they going to get that amount of nuclear, solar, or wind and where will the populace be accepting of wind farms or solar arrays the size of entire countries. France has 18 nuclear plants with 56 operating reactors built over the past 50 years. Europe will need 15 times that amount to support electrification of its industry and what the solar and wind numbers ignore is the amount of battery storage that will be required in addition to the amount of land. The battery storage will cost more than the 836 nuclear reactors and only last 10 years. making wind and solar entirely non-competitive. That doesn’t include all of the heat pumps that they are mandating for non commercial facilities that will also be adding huge loads to the system and it also doesn’t include the energy required for vehicle electrification.
They can use all of the PPA’s (Purchase Power Agreements) that they want but that is only papering over the issue. They will still be using fossil fuel based electricity.
What the proponents of these policies don’t understand is the scale of the amount of energy required.
NY State is facing the same issues. For NY State to achieve its goals, the amount of required renewables far exceeds what is currently on the drawing board and they are having major difficulties installing that insufficient amount. The problem isn’t a lack of effort on the part of NY State as is implied by the environmental groups. The problem is that the CLCPA is as unworkable as is the effort to electrify European industry needing entire countries of renewables or 750 years of nuclear plant construction.
Thus last Thursday’s energy conference.
To show NY States energy chasm, I made the chart below in 2019, modified in 2022 after the storage report was released. It was presented to NYSERDA personnel at your office in Westchester in May, 2019, then to more senior NYSERDDA personnel in Albany in late 2019, and to Chairman Rhodes of the PSC in January, 2020, along with several other members of the state Senate and Assembly at about the same time. No one questioned the numbers. As you may recall, because you were in the room, they just looked down at the table when they saw them.
Column A shows NY State’s fossil fuel load in 2019 in Gigawatt Hours (GWh), about 780,000 or 780 Terawatt hours. Column B shown what the load would be if it was electrified, about 360,000 GWh. Note that there are some commercial loads that were not included in this chart and hydrogen electrolysis was not included, so both columns A & B would be higher. Also note that anything that was non-carbon generation, such as Robert Moses or the nuclear plants is not included on the chart. Those are an additional 65,000 GWh that are in addition so the actual load in column B is about 425,000 GWh.
In 2019, to address those massive loads by 2035, NY State had planned 15 GW of solar, 9 GW of offshore wind and some onshore wind along with CHPE. Those are shown in column D and there are nowhere near large enough to even offset the fossil fuel electric load that NY State expects to eliminate by 2040. When I showed this chart to NYSERDA in 2019 they told me, “We will install renewables faster than you are calculating”, except column D was their numbers. Now, the 9 GW of offshore wind is in question because of exorbitant costs that they were told in 2019 would be there. The 15 GW of solar has been scaled back to 10 GW, and NYSERDA said in their 6 GW energy storage report that they would need 1000+ hours of storage to make it all work. That shows up in column C and in 2022, it would have cost $3.4 trillion. Probably about $2.5 trillion now.
This is the same issue that the European chemical companies are facing. The energy loads are enormous while the energy density of the renewables, with the exception of nuclear, is very low so it will require an area the size of entire countries to generate it.
Renewables can reduce fossil fuel loads but the loads are far to large to be replaced by renewables.
The plan just doesn’t work and the sooner that NY State realizes that and stops listening to the fringe that is loud but has absolutely no understanding of energy or the utility system, the better off we will all be.
There are ways to achieve greatly reduced carbon emissions at far lower costs, but plans like the CLCPA and what the EU is trying will not work.
Rich Ellenbogen
