Renewable Energy: Prospects for Implementation

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PART I

RENEWABLE ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES

Chapter 1

The Cinderella options

A study of modernized renewable energy technologies Part 1 – A technical assessment

M.J. Grubb,     Dr Michael Grubb is director of Energy and Environment Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE, UK, and is UK representative on the Renewable Energy Committee of the World Energy Council.

This paper examines the status of and prospects for renewable energy technologies. Wind energy is taken as an example of the negative myths which impede renewable energy developments. The paper then emphasises the great diversity in renewables: different technologies are at very different stages of development, and are suited to different countries, locations and applications. Further technology development is very important, but nevertheless it is argued that the prospects for obtaining large-scale renewable supplies are good, especially in the industrialised countries. Sufficient evidence exists for renewables to be taken much more seriously in energy scenarios and policy developments.

Keywords

Renewable energy

Energy policy process

Supply

Renewable energy is an enigma. Everyone is in favour of it, but few take it seriously. Most agree that renewable energy research deserves more money, but the funding remains small compared with much more speculative technologies such as nuclear fusion. Renewable energy is praised for its environmental advantages, whilst environmental objections are raised increasingly as the major constraint.

There are two main attitudes towards the prospects for and importance of non-hydro renewable energy. One, widely expressed throughout the environmental community, is that in the long run renewable energy will save us all from the unsustainable consequences of relying upon fossil fuels and nuclear power. The Brundtland Commission echoed this in stating that renewable energy ‘should form the foundation of the global energy structure during the 21st Century’.¹

The other common attitude is that in the short to medium time horizon relevant to the real world of industrial and political policy formation and investment, non-hydro renewable sources are essentially irrelevant: that for the foreseeable future their contribution will remain marginal. This attitude is reflected in the levels of research, development and demonstration (RD&D) funding, with expenditure on the best supported of renewable technologies being a small fraction of direct government expenditure on fossil and nuclear sources (see Figure 1) and an even smaller component of total public support (see Figure 2).² It is apparent in the institutional balance, with the major international institutions devoted to nuclear power having no counterparts for renewable energy.³ It is evident in the absence of renewable energy from general energy policy development – to take but two examples, the EC documents discussing the projected internal energy market,⁴ and the original draft proposals for electricity privatization in the UK.⁵ Above all, it is demonstrated by mainstream energy forecasts, which in almost every OECD country project non-hydro renewable energy contributions still at a few per cent of supply decades into the next century.

Figure 1 Total IEA direct government RD&D expenditure (1988 US$m).

Figure 2 Total UK public sector expenditure on energy RD&D (1985–86 £m).

Hatched areas = spending by nationalized industry

Remainder = direct government expenditure

Others: wave, geothermal aquifer, solar, biomass, tide, hydro/general, ETSU services.

Taken together, these two attitudes suggest that one day the world must run on renewable energy, but that the timescale on which it will even begin to make a significant contribution is not foreseeable. This is unfortunate. It is also wrong.

Currently, renewable energy sources probably account for somewhat over 20% of primary world energy supplies (input equivalents), this being dominated by biomass (14%)⁶ and hydro (6.7%).⁷ The contributions from passive solar drying and heating are significant but these are generally considered as incidental gains. Active solar water heating is very important in some countries in displacing commercial fuels,⁸ and photovoltaics and wind make significant contributions in special markets, eg for communications and pumping. For none of these applications are useful statistics available.

Biomass use is dominated by non-commercial fuels for open-hearth combustion, especially in developing countries, a use which cannot expand much further. Large-scale hydro is an established form of centralized power production, with probably limited scope for further developments in industrial countries because of environmental constraints. This paper concentrates upon the prospects for commercial non-hydro renewable sources using modern technologies, from which contributions are currently very small.

Despite this, it is argued that non-hydro renewable energy technologies can no longer be relegated to the backwaters of the industrial and policy process: a number are already sufficiently developed and commercially attractive, or soon will be, and their impact could be swift and substantial. Yet the opposite extreme does not hold either: non-renewable energy will remain important throughout the next century, and attempts to promote visions of a world run entirely on renewables are misguided and ultimately damaging.

The paper is divided into two parts. Part 1 assesses the technical prospects for renewable energy, based on resource constraints, known technology and reasonable technological expectations, with minimal attention to its current market situation and majority expectations. Part 2 (Chapter 19 in this volume) then considers the current situation, analyses the reasons for various attitudes towards renewable energy sources, and outlines a number of policy issues. The paper concludes that a revolution of attitudes towards renewable energy in the policy communities of industrial countries is required and is indeed inevitable in time. The speed and impact of the transition will depend largely upon policies adopted over the next decade. The aftermath of the process will not be a panacea for all our energy ills, but a situation in which the large economic potential for renewable energy sources is accepted, with recognition of both benefits and drawbacks: a situation, in other words, in which they are treated on a par with conventional sources as a central component of broadly sustainable energy economies.

The renewable resource base

Renewable energy flows are illustrated in Figure 3.⁹ The rate of solar input is nearly 20 000 times human energy consumption. Of this, 30% is immediately reflected and nearly half is converted directly to heat and re-radiated as infra-red radiation. The great majority of the rest is taken up in the hydrological cycle, and the tiny fraction of this which falls as rain or snow over high ground and can be captured in runoff forms the hydro resource, estimated at 10–30% of current world energy use.¹⁰ The atmospheric heat gradients drive the winds, which dissipate power at about 40 times the rate of human energy consumption; the amount converted to waves is roughly equal to human consumption. Finally, some 3 500 EJ/year – some nine times human consumption – is absorbed in photosynthesis every year.¹¹ To this list, in principle, should be added the very large ocean resources arising from heat gradients and ocean streams, the osmotic resource arising from the differing salt content of river and sea water, and the vapour pressure resources from the heating of desert air.

Figure 3 Global renewable energy flows (units TW 10¹²W; commercial energy consumption = 10.5 TW). Source: Twidell and Weir, op cit, Ref 9; (data for photosynthesis amended from ref 11).

The solar resource represents the maximum physical energy available. This is not the case for tidal and geothermal energy.¹² Tidal energy schemes work by increasing the dissipation of tidal energy at shorelines, so the natural rate of dissipation – the number in Figure 3 – does not represent the theoretical limit. Geothermal energy similarly does not rely on the natural heat flow, but generally extracts heat which has accumulated over centuries in water (aquifers) or hot rocks as a result of tidal friction and natural radioactive decay, and extracts it much faster than it can be replaced.

Consequently geothermal energy is not a renewable source, although it is usually included as such. It is most easily exploited from aquifers, but the resource is probably fairly small.¹³ Pressurized brines, at greater depth, present a largely unknown resource. The theoretical resource from tapping hot rocks or even magmas is essentially infinite – the heat contained in the top few kilometres of rock worldwide is larger even than world uranium reserves exploited with breeder reactors – but only a very small portion of this could conceivably be tapped. For these, the technical and resource characteristics are too uncertain to allow more meaningful estimates.

It is clear that, physically, renewable and geothermal energy resources are more than adequate to meet any conceivable human needs. The question is, can these resources be tapped in an acceptable manner without excessive costs?

Technologies for tapping renewable energy flows which have attracted most interest are listed in Table 1. The list is by no means comprehensive and each broad category can be subdivided into numerous detailed technologies.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it serves to emphasize that renewable energy technologies cover a very diverse range: from ideas still on the drawing board to well-developed technologies; from local and small scale systems, through intermediate scale dispersed and centralized applications, up to the large civil engineering projects of hydro and offshore developments, and even solar satellites.

Table 1

Main renewable energy categories.

This paper does not attempt even a cursory review of the status and prospects for such a large number of distinct technologies. Instead, it focusses initially upon one source in one country, and then seeks to expand the observations first to incorporate other technologies, and then to an international view.

Wind energy in the UK

A case study

The country chosen is the UK, which illustrates a number of issues clearly. UK resources of the most familiar forms of renewable energy, namely hydro, geothermal aquifers, and solar, are relatively poor. A reasonable level of data on the less familiar forms is now available, due largely to efforts of the Department of Energy’s Energy Technology Support Unit (ETSU). However, renewable energy has never featured significantly in the Department’s mainstream discussion or projections. It is thus especially interesting to see how Britain¹⁵ fares on a close analysis of the potential for renewable sources.

The technology chosen for detailed consideration is wind energy. This is a prime example of a renewable technology which most people have found difficult to take seriously, because the wind appears to be such a feeble and variable resource. Nearly all studies during the 1970s concluded that wind could not be a large-scale source of economic power, and the Department of Energy ranked wind energy as one of the least promising of renewable energy technologies. Hoyle claimed that to meet Britain’s electricity needs, windmills ‘would have to cover more than half the area of all England’, and ‘… the number of serious accidents would probably run into hundreds of thousands each year’.¹⁶

For many people, wind energy retains the image of a primitive, mediaeval technology not fit for the modern age. And yet, the technology has advanced very rapidly in the last decade, and there have been many favourable assessments. Less than 10 years after the above assessments, the Department’s programme managers wrote that ‘the Department of Energy now regards large scale generation from wind energy as a serious option’,¹⁷ with an estimated contribution by 2025 of up to 10% of current generation.¹⁸ Its potential is still in dispute but the change in assessment does seem sufficient to raise questions about the assumptions and validity of some earlier assessments of renewable energy’s potential.

Five main reasons have been advanced in claiming that the realistic potential for wind energy is very small:

• it is too costly;

• the technology is not reliable;

• the variability of wind energy means that it cannot be used as a major source of power without storage, which would be very expensive;

• the resource, after taking into account the siting constraints upon wind turbines, is small;

• the lack of any commercial development proves the case.

Let us consider these in turn.

Myth 1 – wind energy is much too costly

The 20th century has seen occasional attempts to modernize wind energy technology, but there were no concerted efforts until the mid-1970s, when several government programmes started to develop very large turbines. Much was learned, but most projects ran into substantial technical problems and high costs; a detailed assessment of two of the leading contenders in 1983 concluded that the energy would cost much more than from conventional options.¹⁹

A second phase of development, from 1982–85, was dominated by the creation of a market for small and medium sized machines in the USA, with a favourable regulatory regime combined with generous Federal and State tax incentives which made wind energy in some areas – particularly California – an attractive private investment even at the then high costs. Installation rates in California rose from 10 MW/year in 1981 to 400 MW/year in 1984, with a cumulative investment by 1986 of about $2 000 million. In this brief period the mean size of commercial units doubled, performance improved dramatically, and costs fell sharply, mostly as a result of applying advanced materials and control systems and a better understanding of wind turbine dynamics and stresses.

The fall in oil prices and removal of tax credits then greatly tightened the market at a time when several large companies had put substantial capital into new machines, leading to further cost and price cuts.

In Denmark, one of the major manufacturers, wind energy is regarded as a major economic resource, with 350 MW installed by 1990 feeding an official target of 2 000 MW (to generate 10% of electricity) by 2000.²⁰ In 1988 the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) startled some observers by stating that at very good sites in Britain, modern wind turbines could generate electricity more cheaply than either nuclear or coal stations.²¹ Avenues expected to give further substantial improvements have been identified.²² However, the CEGB and others contended that the resources – at competitive costs – were small and the technology was still