The Problem Of The Grid

There seems to a growing acceptance -- you can sense  it in public and private conversations -- that eventually fossil fuels will be exhausted or will have to be abandoned, either for economic or environmental reasons. With this acceptance there also seems to be the comfortable assurance that clean renewable energy sources will be harnessed instead to run our present society more or less unchanged into the indefinite future.  You hear statements to the effect that we already have the tools; we only need the will to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power.

This idea does not stand up to close examination.

When people think of energy consumption they may think of their own household consumption, the electricity they use to operate their appliances, the energy they use to heat or cool their indoor environment in extreme outside temperatures, the energy they use to operate their cars. However this household consumption is only a small part of the total energy consumption of an industrial society.

Process heat,  space heating, vehicle and mobile machine operation for mining,  manufacturing, commerce, and the service  industries around the world, including those that manufacture and deliver wind turbines and solar panels, consume most of the world's energy supply. Most of this energy is supplied directly by the burning of fossil fuels. The smelting of metals, the making of cement, the  running of the engines of container ships,  trains, and trucks all currently depend on fossil fuels. 

Less than 20 percent of the energy  used by industrial society at present is delivered by electricity, so to run that society on nothing but electrical energy would require at least a five fold increase in the capacity of the electrical grid, already monumental in size.

In fact industrial capitalism is commited to growth where possible, since growth pays the interest on loans and investments. Electricity would have to supply all of the world's present energy consumption and about 2 percent more each year to keep our  industrial society ticking over.  That is a doubling every thirty five years in the amount of electricity generated  and carried by the grid.  At what  has been a normal rate of growth in global energy consumption, in thirty five years  solar panels, wind turbines and the electrical grid  would have to deliver not five times  the present  amount of electricity  but ten times. 

We often hear the pious hope expressed that "renewable" energy will run industrial society, but I cannot say I have ever heard anyone say that we had better get on with a ten fold expansion of the world's electrical grids over the next thirty some years. Considering that even maintaining the present grids is problematical, one can imagine the response to the suggestion that these grids be expanded to ten times their existing capacity. 

Even of the less than twenty percent of global energy use supplied by electricity only a modest fraction is presently supplied from "renewable" sources, and of that only a fraction is supplied by solar panels and wind turbines. Much of the world's electricity is still supplied by the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil, and most of the rest is supplied by nuclear and hydro power. 

Even if it were possible to expand global electrical supply more than tenfold using solar panels and wind turbines, it would still be necessary to  build that huge  super grid ten times the size of the present.  The web of powerlines that crisscross the countryside  would have to become much denser and more obtrusive,  and become more and more so with time. 

These powerlines generally have to have a clear cut swath of corridor beneath and to each side of them to avoid flashovers and fires.  We would have to expect that the area  clear cut under powerlines to be multiplied by as much as ten times over the next thirty some years,  not to mention the forest that would be destroyed to make way for  solar panels and wind turbines. This would mean a huge loss of trees in heavily forested countries like Canada, at a time when we are looking to forests to offset the effects of carbon pollution.