Many have been emotionally drawn to the green revolution in the belief that renewable energy represents the free spirit, restoring personal and community independence, bringing freedom from coal barons and gouging sheikhs, and above all delivering a grass-roots, “alternative”, democratic energy system where, in Schumacher’s resonant words, “Small is Beautiful”.
“What would you rather have in your neighbourhood?”, I remember being asked in 2005, “A little wind turbine swirling gently in the breeze, or a nuclear power station and pylons?”
As it is turning out, and particularly so now that Ed Miliband is back in charge of energy policy after 14 years in the wilderness, the green transition means armies of gargantuan wind turbines on land and sea, as well as a great blue-black mirror of solar panels glazing over thousands of acres of farmland, a neurotic spider’s web of grid cables criss-crossing the country, and dozens and dozens of whining substations and vast Area 51-like compounds of shipping-container sized lithium-ion batteries.
Rather than a delightful potpourri of Three Acres and a Cow, the Good Life, and Virgil’s Eclogues it is proving to be more like a particularly nasty corner of Tolkien’s Mordor, with the moral imperative of emissions reduction being the One Ring to rule them all… and in the darkness bind them.
And as if that were not bad enough, it transpires that in spite of all this green industrialisation we still require the nuclear and the conventional gas turbine power stations that we thought we were replacing. We may not use them as much, but it seems that reliability is, after all, an issue with wind and solar, and that dispatchable generators are needed to guarantee security of supply at times when the British weather fails to deliver. ‘Who knew, except everyone?’ as the Americans say.
However, the sheer immensity of low carbon industrialisation is coming as an unwelcome shock to those who only a few years ago would have given at least passive support to wind and solar development. There was clearly a profound misunderstanding about the physical character of renewable energy power systems. But no one should in fact be surprised. The deep physics of renewable energy flows—wind and solar radiation as it is at the surface of the earth—in fact implies exactly what we are observing in the build-out of turbines, photovoltaics and network infrastructure. While there is a substantial quantity of energy in the wind, the thermodynamic quality of that energy is very low. It is highly disordered and uncontrollably variable in strength. Put more technically, the entropy of wind is very high, close to random heat in fact, and it consequently offers only a very modest thermodynamic gradient with which to do useful work. It is for this reason that there are no organisms that derive their metabolic energy from wind, an extraordinary fact given its widespread availability at unthreatening temperatures. Wind energy is simply too chaotic to support life.
Solar radiation is somewhat better. Indeed, outside the earth’s atmosphere it is of fairly high quality, but on the surface of the planet and seen from the perspective of a point receptor (such as a leaf or a photovoltaic cell) it is degraded by atmospheric interference, by the scattering caused by clouds and airborne dust, and critically by the rotation of the earth, which causes a continuously varying angle of incidence and many hours of total occlusion. Plants do derive energy from sunshine, but they are relatively simple organisms, and they do not move rapidly or have complex nervous systems.
Some aspects of these simple facts about wind and solar energy flows are intuitively obvious – the wind bloweth where it listeth … the night cometh, when no man can work – but the critical implications tend to escape even those well versed in physics. The electricity supply as required by the consumer has to be extremely concentrated, ordered, controllable and non-random. If a diffuse and chaotic fuel such as wind or solar is being used to generate electricity for that supply it is obvious that a great deal of work is being done to it by the energy collection devices, the wind turbines and solar panels, and that extensive entropy correction is taking place in the grid system. The low energy density of wind and sun implies extremely large collection devices – enormous wind turbines with large blades, vast areas of solar panels – plus batteries and sophisticated grid management practices, including demand control. It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.
A concrete example will make this clear. The 1,400 MW Sophia Offshore Wind Farm on the Dogger Bank is currently under construction and will cover an area of nearly 600 square kilometres (it would just fit into Middlesex if that helps the imagination). It is one of many major wind installations that the government is intending to drive through in its ambition to quadruple offshore capacity. We currently have about 15 Gigawatts [GW] of operational offshore wind, so the plans imply another 45 GW, or 30 Sophias of capacity.
This offshore wind farm will employ the Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD, one of the largest wind turbines on the market, with a generating capacity of 14 Megawatts [MW]. It has three blades of 108m in length, each weighing 65 tonnes.[1] The nacelle, the box containing the generator at the top of the tower, weighs 500 tonnes, which Siemens proudly describes as a lightweight machine. Compared to other brands, this may even be true.
The overall height is some 252m, only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard, with foundations which will be, according to Sophia’s own publicity, 80 to 90m in length and weigh 1,200 to 1,400 tonnes each. The tower above the mudline will probably weigh less than that, but not much less, so the total weight of each turbine – blades, nacelle, tower and foundations – is likely to be nudging towards 3,000 tonnes.
Sofia will use 100 of these structures, so we can estimate that the wind farm alone accounts for about 300,000 tonnes of industrial equipment, mostly steel, some concrete, and fibre-glass reinforced epoxy in the blades. (For reference, the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers weigh a mere 65,000 tonnes each.) And this is before we have taken into account the offshore substations and the cables required to connect each turbine to those substations, and then the cables required to go ashore to yet another substation, and then the overhead grid and pylons needed to transmit energy onwards to distant consumers.
Multiply all this by thirty to meet the offshore wind targets, and we arrive at 9 million tons of industrial equipment for the additional offshore installations alone. For scale, recall that the UK’s total annual production of steel is only 6 million tons, and one can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the mark Ed Miliband wishes to make upon the country. This Wind and Sun King makes Louis XIV look like small potatoes.
The total mass of manufactures involved in Sophia is difficult for anyone outside the project to calculate, but the order of magnitude is clear: it’s huge, and regardless of your views on its beauty, it’s certainly not going to be cheap. Sophia states that its total capital cost is in the region of £3 billion, a great deal for an asset exposed to the North Sea and likely to have a short economic lifetime. Yes, of course, the industry also, paradoxically, claims that its electricity is the lowest cost available, but no one with any knowledge of the sector believes this, and for more details on the reality of wind production, costs and its Mayfly-like lifetime, readers may wish to consult an earlier article on Briefings for Britain by the author co-written with Professor Gordon Hughes “The Cost of Offshore Wind Power: Blindness and Insight”.
Onshore machines will weigh less than Sophia’s marine leviathans but will be of broadly similar dimensions. The Vestas V136 4.2 MW, for example, has blades of 76m and hub heights up to 166m, giving a total overall height of over 240m. The Eiffel Tower is only some 60 meters taller. These are the sorts of devices that Ed Miliband now thinks acceptable next to rural dwellings. The precise numbers that he has in mind for deployment onshore are not clear, but one has to assume that he would like see many hundreds if not thousands of them.
But relative to its size such generating plant will provide only a small quantity of electrical energy. Sophia, for example, will produce some 6 Terawatt hours [TWh] per year, according to the company’s website. That implies a load factor of about 50%, which is optimistic and unlikely to be maintained over the entire lifetime (for more on this see Constable and Hughes cited above). But accepting 6 TWh per year for the sake of argument, this is equivalent to about 2% of total annual UK demand for electricity. Given the sheer size of Sophia that really isn’t very much, and in relation to its spatial presence is only 0.01 TWh per square kilometre. The renewable mountain goes into labour and gives birth to a mouse.
Solar, as predicted from theory, is slightly better, but still abysmal. Mr Miliband recently over-ruled the recommendations of his own planning inspectors to consent a 500 MW photovoltaic installation on 2,500 acres (10 square kilometres) of Suffolk farmland near Newmarket. It is about fifteen miles long, comprises about 1 million solar panels, and brings with it three large compounds of Battery Energy Storage Systems, all quite close to local villages. In spite of this gross magnitude the site will generate only about 0.5 TWh of electrical energy per year, or 0.05 TWh per square kilometre, a very poor exchange for the humanly comestible energy, food, that could be otherwise grown on the land.
For comparison, consider the Sizewell B nuclear power station, also in Suffolk, and running since 1995. It has a capacity of 1.2 GW, slightly smaller than Sofia wind farm, and the operational compound in which the building is located occupies a land area of about 0.5 square kilometres, less than a thousandth of Sophia’s area. Nevertheless, Sizewell B generates more energy, as much as 10 TWh a year but currently, 2023, about 7.6 TWh, just over 15 TWh per square kilometre. It is thus, very roughly, 1,500 times more productive of energy per unit of land than the Sophia wind farm, and 300 times more productive than the Sunnica solar proposal. On this land use basis, Sizewell C, the successor to B now under construction, plausibly claims that it will be 1,000 times more productive than solar and 3,000 times more so than onshore wind.
That is typical for conventional power stations; they are small and highly productive compared to renewables. As we have seen, the explanation for this difference is to be found in the entropy of the fuels used, that is to say in their physical and thermodynamic quality. Nuclear fuels are a remnant of the low entropy state of the early universe and are remarkably energy dense. One might say they are God’s last best gifts to mankind, if we are wise enough to use them well. The energy in coal, oil and gas is often casually described as being fossilised sunshine, and while there is some truth in this, it isn’t the whole story, or even the most important part of it. Two additional points should be borne in mind. Firstly, the high energy state of fossil fuels is in part derived from the complex molecules created with sunshine by organisms that have evolved by natural selection and are therefore themselves highly ordered and complex. But if this were all, biomass would be as energy dense as coal, and of course it isn’t. Which brings us to the second point. The ancient, moderately complex biological material underwent compression as the result of gravitational force, further reducing its entropy, and at the same time increasing its temperature and resulting in chemical transformations raising the energy state. In an important sense, much of the free energy in fossil fuels is derived from gravitational force applied over hundreds of millions of years. This is little appreciated outside geological circles, but it is what makes fossil fuels so extremely special in physical terms, and very hard to match let alone replace. Relative to the energy they deliver, fossil fuels require very little capital structure, and consequently have a high energy return on energy invested. The comparison with renewables is extremely sharp. The thin and chaotic nature of the wind and solar fluxes implies the need for very large conversion devices to collect the available energy, and major grid expansion to carry that energy, not only from distant locations to centres of demand, but also to permit the rapid transmission of energy from one part of the system, where there is a surplus of wind or sun, to another where there may be a deficit. Due to their uncontrollable nature and geographic dispersion renewables require an almost frictionless network free of bottlenecks. Since that is impossible there will also be a need for exorbitantly expensive batteries.
Correcting the severe physical defects of wind and solar generation requires capital equipment on the grandest of scales, and as a result the adoption of renewables results in a low productivity system which is intrinsically expensive and resource hungry compared to the fossil and nuclear alternatives.
Moreover, most of the extraction, conversion and delivery system required by renewables is at present manufactured by a fossil-fuelled global economy, much of it in Asia and in particularly in China, which is cheap though polluting. But if, as the government seems to intend with its emphasis on locally produced green equipment and carbon border tariffs on imported goods, renewable energy itself becomes the dominant input to the domestic manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels, then the costs will rise dramatically. It is not even clear that such a system would have a sufficiently high energy return both to maintain and reproduce its capital equipment while also providing a decent energy surplus for other human purposes, such as schools-and-hospitals. The margin could be very thin, or even non-existent. At best, the renewable energy sector would not only be the largest consumer of its own energy output, but would engross the bulk of the real capital constituting the economy. Those in and owning the green energy business would possess levels of relative wealth and power not seen since those enjoyed by the gentry and aristocracy of the pre-coal economies of Europe. One imagines that this would be politically extremely controversial.
So, there is more to the industrial dystopia of wind turbines and solar farms than mere aesthetics and a counterproductive climate policy, important though both considerations are. The social transformation they imply is more of a counter-revolution than a progressive enhancement of human freedom.
[1] https://www.projectcargojournal.com/construction/2021/11/16/video-siemens-gamesa-installs-14-mw-wind-turbine-prototype/?gdpr=accept
