Why Nuclear Power is the Path to Low-Carbon Energy: Part 1

(This piece is the first part of an edited excerpt from Robert Bryce’s 2020 book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. The second part can be found here.)

Since the 1970s, the largest non-governmental environmental organizations have been united on one energy issue more than any other: that we should not be using nuclear energy, and that we should be using far more renewables, like wind and solar energy, than we are now.

For instance, Greenpeace argues that renewable energy, “smartly used, can and will meet our demands. No oil spills, no climate change, no radiation danger, no nuclear waste.” A similar all-renewable-no-nuclear vision is being pushed by the Sierra Club, America’s biggest environmental group. The Club has a “beyond oil” campaign, a “beyond coal” campaign, and a “beyond natural gas” campaign. The group says “we have the means to reverse global warming and create a clean, renewable energy future.” Another big environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, also opposes nuclear energy, saying it “should not be a leading strategy for diversifying America’s energy portfolio and reducing carbon pollution.” The NRDC was among the environmental groups who negotiated the early shutdown of California’s last remaining nuclear energy plant, Diablo Canyon, which will be shuttered by 2025.

In 2005, some 300 environmental organizations — including Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and Public Citizen — signed a manifesto which said “we flatly reject the argument that increased investment in nuclear capacity is an acceptable or necessary solution…nuclear power should not be a part of any solution to address global warming.” In 2016, Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club reaffirmed the club’s position, saying it “remains in firm opposition to dangerous nuclear power.” That’s not a new position. In 1974, Brune’s group said it “opposes the licensing, construction and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process.” It went on, saying that it will continue its opposition, pending “development of adequate national and global policies to curb energy over-use and unnecessary economic growth.” The Sierra Club didn’t delete that last part about “unnecessary economic growth” until 2016.

If nuclear is the red-headed stepchild of American energy politics, solar energy is like motherhood and apple pie: everyone loves it. In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that 89 percent of adults in the US favor expanded use of solar energy. The same poll found 83 percent wanted more wind. Meanwhile, nuclear energy, hydraulic fracturing and coal mining were favored by just 43, 42 and 41 percent, respectively.

In 2017, four Democratic senators — Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Edward J. Markey (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (Vt.) — introduced the 100 by 50 Act, which calls on the U.S. to be completely free of fossil fuels by 2050. The bill included a “carbon duty” on any foreign-made goods that are made by energy-intensive industries. The 100 by 50 legislation was immediately endorsed by a who’s who of all-renewable advocates, including actor Mark Ruffalo, the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune, and May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org.

Also in 2017, New York governor Andrew Cuomo touted his renewable-energy goals, and declared that his state was not going to stop “until we reach 100 percent renewable because that’s what a sustainable New York is really all about.” That same year, 54 Massachusetts lawmakers — representing more than a quarter of the members of the state legislature — signed onto a bill that would require the Bay State to get 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050. The bill says the goal is to “ultimately eliminate our use of fossil fuels and other polluting and dangerous forms of energy.”

The 100% renewable stance is also gaining traction with state and local governments. By mid-2019, more than 100 US cities, along with 11 counties and six states, had adopted goals to get all of their electricity from renewable energy. (Note that many of these governments say they will be using “clean” or “carbon-free” energy, not just renewables.) In addition, more than 100 companies from around the world including brands like Ikea, Visa, and Sony, have committed to getting all of their electricity from renewables.

In early 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), a Democrat whose district includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, along with Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, announced the Green New Deal, which calls for a complete overhaul of America’s energy and power systems so that greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to zero by 2050. Although the text of the resolution is silent about what types of technologies should be used to achieve that goal, Ocasio-Cortez has made it clear that she supports the all-renewable approach. Shortly after she was elected to Congress, Ocasio-Cortez told a group of supporters, “We don’t have a choice. We do not have a choice. We have to get to 100 percent renewable energy in 10 years. There is no other option.”

A few months later, while appearing on Seth Meyer’s TV show, “Late Night,” she declared, “we need to declare our North Star, and our North Star is 100 percent renewable energy.”

In early 2019, some 600 environmental groups submitted a letter to the US House of Representatives which said that the US must shift to “100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.” The same letter said that any “definition of renewable energy must…exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large-scale hydro, and waste-to-energy technologies.” It continued, saying that the new electric grid must have the “ability to incorporate battery storage and distributed energy systems that are democratically governed.” Signers of the letter included groups like Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group.

Politicians, environmental groups, activists, and big business are advancing the all-renewable goal because, as David Roberts put it at Vox.com, it is “a clear, intuitive, and inspiring target, an effective way to rally public support and speed the transition.” In fact, one of America’s most prominent climate activists, Bill McKibben, has said that he and his fellow activists support the all-renewable approach because it doesn’t require them to muddy their message by defending nuclear energy.

Despite the attractiveness of the all-renewable concept to voters, activists, politicians and corporations wanting positive media coverage, here’s the truth: renewables alone aren’t going to be enough to meet what Nobel laureate Richard Smalley described as the terawatt challenge: the fact that replacing daily energy consumption from crude oil will require 14.5 terawatts per day of alternative energy sources.

Four factors will prevent all-renewable approaches from generating anything close to that amount of energy: cost, storage, scale, and land use. Let’s look at the cost issue first.

Germany provides a clear example of how renewable mandates push up electricity prices. According to Agora Energiewende, a think tank that focuses on Germany’s transition toward renewables, residential electricity prices in Germany jumped by 50 percent between 2007 and 2018. The result: German residential customers now have some of the highest-priced electricity in Europe, about $0.37 per kilowatt-hour. German industry has also been hit hard. Between 2016 and 2018, electricity prices doubled for the Mittelstand, the term used for the mid-sized companies that employ some 20 million German workers and account for a big part of the country’s industrial output. A study of the Mittelstand found that a third of company leaders in the sector believed electricity prices were a threat to their businesses.

Ontario, Canada has also pushed hard for renewables. In 2009, the provincial government launched the Green Energy Act which guaranteed long-term contracts to renewable-energy generators at prices that were well above market rates. To pay for the measure, Ontario, which is home to nearly a third of Canada’s 36 million residents, added surcharges to ratepayers’ electric bills. The province also forced the closure of coal plants, claiming that doing so would improve public health. The result: between 2008 and 2016, residential electricity rates in the province jumped by 71 percent, which was more than double the average increase in the rest of Canada over that time period. Soaring electricity prices led to a backlash from consumers, municipalities, and other electricity users. A 2017 article in the Windsor Star focused on the rural town of Kingsville, population 8,700, which saw its electricity costs nearly double between 2011 and 2014. The surging costs were forcing the town to raise taxes and spend more money on efficiency projects. Nelson Santos, the mayor of the town said that even with “conservation efforts, the costs are going up.”

In 2018, the Fraser Institute, a free-market think tank, released a report which concluded that “soaring electricity costs in Ontario have placed a significant financial burden on the manufacturing sector and hampered its competitiveness.” The same report found that phasing out coal had “almost no effect on Ontario’s air pollution levels” and that the province’s high electricity prices were “responsible for approximately 75,000 job losses in the manufacturing sector from 2008 to 2015.”

Voter disgust with sky-high electricity prices played a major role in the province’s 2018 elections. Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party, led by Doug Ford, drubbed the incumbent Liberal party, which had ruled the province for 15 years. Ford campaigned on a pledge to reduce electricity rates by 12 percent. That promise resonated. Ford’s Progressive Conservatives won 76 of the 124 seats in the province’s legislature while the Liberals, who had been led by premier Kathleen Wynne, retained just seven seats, meaning it was reduced to rump-party status. In an interview a few months after the election, Kenneth Green, an energy analyst at the Fraser Institute told me, “the hottest issue was electricity rates. The election turned on that.” Ford’s new government quickly cancelled 758 renewable-energy contracts on projects that were being developed in Ontario, claiming that the move would save ratepayers about $790 million. In December 2018, Ford’s government repealed the Green Energy Act.

Or consider Australia, where electricity prices skyrocketed after the government imposed renewable-energy mandates and emissions caps on the electric sector. High electricity prices were such a hot issue that they played a major role in the 2018 ouster of the country’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, a member of the center-left Labor party. The country’s new prime minister, Scott Morrison, a staunch coal supporter, has pledged to bring down electricity costs by having the government intervene in the markets.

Shortly after Turnbull was ousted, Australia’s new energy minister, Angus Taylor, declared that the new government would be phasing out its renewable-energy targets and would “not be driven by ideology or grand gestures, but pragmatism.” While presenting the electricity-overhaul plan to the Australian House of Representatives, Taylor said “we have seen the experiment of 50 percent renewable energy targets in South Australia and the results were shocking… In South Australia we now have prices at around 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. They are among the highest in the country.” Taylor concluded his remarks saying, “We are going to back investment in fair dinkum reliable generation because that’s what this country needs.” (Fair dinkum is Australian slang for a fair deal.)

In the U.S., California continues to be a leader in both renewable mandates and high electricity prices. In 2008, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order that required the state’s utilities to be obtaining one third of the electricity they sell from renewables by 2020. In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that boosted the mandate to 50 percent by 2030. Those moves had an effect on electricity prices. In 2018, Mark Nelson and Michael Shellenberger of the Berkeley-based think tank, Environmental Progress, released a report which showed that California’s electricity rates rose at more than five times the rate of electricity prices in the rest of the US between 2011 and 2017.

California’s electricity rates are rapidly rising. Over the past decade, California’s electricity rates increased at a rate that was six times as fast as the rate seen in the rest of the U.S. over that time frame. (Source: M. Nelson & M. Shellenberger / Environmental Progress, Energy Information Administration; Graphic: FREOPP)

Those high prices have led to a backlash. In April 2018, The Two Hundred, a coalition of civil-rights leaders, filed a lawsuit in state court against the California Air Resources Board, claiming that the state’s climate policies are discriminating against low-income and minority consumers. The 102-page lawsuit said California’s “reputation as a global climate leader is built on the state’s dual claims of substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously enjoying a thriving economy. Neither claim is true.”

The suit claims that the state’s climate laws violate the Fair Employment and Housing Act because CARB’s greenhouse gas emissions rules on housing units “have a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members.” The suit also claims the state’s climate laws are illegal under the Federal Housing Act, again, because their effect is felt predominantly by minority communities. It also makes a constitutional claim that minorities are being denied equal protection under the law because California’s climate regulations are making affordable housing unavailable to them.

The lawsuit also argued that California’s climate regulations regressively impact poor and working-class consumers harder than their wealthier counterparts. Since 2007, the suit says “California has had the highest poverty rate in the country,” with “over 8 million people living below the US Census Bureau poverty line when housing costs are taken into account.” The lawsuit continues, claiming CARB has “ignored” the state’s “modest scale of greenhouse gas reductions, as well as the highly regressive costs imposed on current state residents by CARB’s climate programs.” The lawsuit focuses largely on the state’s housing and transportation policies, but it also says that California’s climate change policies increase “the cost of transportation fuels” and “further increase electricity costs.” Those high costs, it claims, “have caused and will cause unconstitutional and unlawful disparate impacts to California’s minority populations, which now comprise a plurality of the state’s population.”

In September 2018, shortly after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed S.B. 100 — a bill that requires the state to be obtaining at least 60 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030 — I interviewed John Gamboa, a member of The Two Hundred. “Every time they pass new regulations, the burden falls on the people who can least afford it,” Gamboa told me. “That’s the history of the environmental movement.”

James Bushnell, an economist at the University of California Berkeley, found that renewable-energy policies are forcing up the state’s energy prices. In 2017, Bushnell published a short paper on the history of California’s electric grid, which he calls “a long and gory one.” Since the early 2000s, “the dominant policy driver” in California’s electricity sector, he wrote, “has unquestionably been a focus on developing renewable sources of electricity generation.” Bushnell then explained that the renewable-energy coming into the electricity market distorts prices because it favors wind and solar producers at the expense of traditional generators that rely on coal, natural gas or nuclear. But because the electric grid still needs traditional generators to supply electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, the state’s utilities must continue operating (and paying for) traditional generation units. The result, Bushnell explains, is that the utilities pass the cost of maintaining all that traditional generation capacity onto end users. In addition, he explained, consumers have to pay for billions of dollars’ worth of new transmission lines needed to carry wind and solar electricity from remote regions into cities. Bushnell specifically mentioned the $2 billion Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project, which will carry electricity from renewable generators in Kern County south to San Bernadino County.

That transmission project is only one of several that will be needed as California pursues ever-greater amounts of renewable electricity. A 2016 report by the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group, estimated that for California to achieve 50 percent renewables by 2030, it would need some $5.8 billion in new transmission projects. The cost of all of those projects will have to be absorbed by ratepayers.

Under an all-renewable scenario, ratepayers would also be stuck with big bills for electricity storage. A key reason why attempting to rely solely on renewables is so costly is that doing so would require enormous batteries to overcome seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar output. For instance, in California, wind- and solar-energy production is roughly three times as great during the summer months as it is in the winter. Storing summer-generated electricity and saving it until it’s needed in winter months, would require batteries, batteries, and more batteries. According to a 2018 analysis done by Steve Brick, an energy analyst at the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy-policy think tank, for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables the state would need about 9.6 terawatt-hours of storage.

It’s difficult to get a handle on what that number means. Therefore, Brick put it into more easily digestible terms: storing that quantity of electricity would require the state to purchase and install some 500 million Powerwalls — the lithium-ion battery pack made by electric-car manufacturer Tesla. If Brick is right, that will mean every resident of California would need roughly 15 Tesla Powerwalls. A full 100 percent–renewable electricity mandate would require even more batteries: some 36.3 terawatt-hours of storage, or about 60 Tesla Powerwalls for every resident of California. At roughly $6,000 per Powerwall, that much storage would cost each resident of the Golden State about $360,000.

Clearly, those numbers are unworkable. Nevertheless, Brick’s findings were similar to those of another report published in 2018 by four American energy analysts who found that attempting to obtain all U.S. electricity from renewables would require overcoming “seasonal cycles and unpredictable weather events” which in turn, would necessitate having “several weeks’ worth of energy storage and/or the installation of much more capacity of solar and wind power than is routinely necessary to meet peak demand.” The quantity of storage needed “would be prohibitively expensive at current prices.” How expensive? Using the cheapest batteries available, it would require spending roughly $1 trillion. That would mean a bill of roughly $3,000 for every citizen of the United States. And remember, that sum doesn’t include the cost of all the wind turbines and solar panels needed to charge those batteries. Finally, and this is no small matter: batteries have a relatively short life span and that life span can be reduced if the batteries are charged and discharged frequently. Lead-acid batteries, like the ones commonly used in conventional automobiles, last three to five years. Tesla offers a 10-year warranty on its Powerwalls. Thus, providing enough battery storage to offset the seasonal variation of renewable sources like wind and solar would also require an ongoing battery inspection and replacement system involving millions upon millions of individual batteries.

Storing enough electricity to fuel the entire US economy is yet more daunting. For instance, Tesla’s $5 billion “Gigafactory” near Reno, Nevada, is one of the world’s single largest battery manufacturing facilities. Despite its size, the total annual production from the Gigafactory could, according to one analyst, “store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand.” He continued, “Thus, in order to fabricate a quantity of batteries to store two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of Gigafactory production.” (emphasis added.)

A number of other studies have also concluded that the all-renewable scenarios being promoted by politicians and environmental groups are not based on sound science. In 2017, a study led by Australian academic and pro-nuclear activist, Ben Heard, found that “while many modelled scenarios have been published claiming to show that a 100-percent renewable electricity system is achievable, there is no empirical or historical evidence that demonstrates that such systems are in fact feasible.”

In an interview in Berkeley at the Environmental Progress office, Heard and I discussed the intermittent nature of renewables and how that requires grid operators to install backup generators or large amounts of storage. Heard neatly summed up the problem, saying the “chaotic nature of renewable energy supply, particularly from wind and solar, is an enormous challenge because it’s the opposite of what we actually want in the system we’re trying to provide. We don’t try to create something chaotic,” he said. “We’re trying to create something stable, predictable that can give people what they want, when they want it.”

The generally higher cost of renewables has had a discernible effect: the bulk of global renewable-energy spending is concentrated in high-watt countries even though electricity demand in those countries is generally flat or declining. For instance, in both the U.S. and Germany, electricity production in 2017 was roughly the same as it was 2004. Meanwhile, in the no-watt and unplugged countries — where electricity is scarce and demand for electricity is booming — spending on renewables lags far behind that of electricity-rich countries.

In 2016, global investment in renewable energy projects totaled some $242 billion. Of that some $106 billion, or 43 percent, was spent in Europe and the US. China spent another $78 billion. Thus, the U.S., Europe, and China together accounted for more than 75 percent of all global spending on renewables.

Meanwhile, spending on solar and wind in Africa, the Middle East, and India totaled just $17 billion. As shown in the graphic below, in 2016, the U.S. spent about $144 per person on renewable energy projects. In India that figure was 20 times less: just $7 per capita. In Africa and the Middle East, it was lower still, just $6 per capita, or 24 times less than renewable-energy spending in the US that year.

Most spending on renewable energy is happening in wealthy countries, not poor ones.

The vast disparity in spending on renewables is particularly apparent when it comes to solar energy. In 2017, all of the countries of Africa produced just 6 terawatt-hours of solar energy. By contrast, the U.S. generated 78 terawatt-hours, or 13 times as much. That’s a remarkable contrast when you remember that Africa’s population of 1.2 billion is nearly four times as large as that of the U.S.

In addition to the cost and storage problem, renewables are simply not scaling fast enough to meet soaring global electricity demand. That point was made in March 2019, by the International Energy Agency, which reported that in 2018, renewables grew at a “double-digit pace, but still not fast enough to meet the increase in demand for electricity around the world.”

Understanding the scale challenge requires only that we do the math. Between 1997 and 2017, global electricity production increased by an average of 571 terawatt-hours per year. That’s the equivalent of adding about one Brazil (which used 590 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2017) to the global electricity sector every year.

What would it take solely to keep up with the growth in global electricity demand by using solar energy? We can answer that question by looking at Germany which has more installed solar-energy capacity that any other European country, about 42,000 megawatts. In 2017, Germany’s solar facilities produced 40 terawatt-hours of electricity. Thus, just to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, the world would have to install 14 times as much photovoltaic capacity as now exists in Germany, and it would have to do so every year.

For those who prefer wind, the example of China is instructive. China has more installed wind capacity than any other country — about 164,000 megawatts. (That’s roughly twice the amount installed in the US.) In 2017, China produced 286 terawatt-hours of energy from all that wind capacity. Recall that global electricity use is growing by 571 terawatt-hours per year. Thus, just to keep pace with electricity demand growth, the world would have to install twice as much wind-energy capacity as China has right now, and it would have to do so annually.

While cost, storage, and scale are all significant challenges, the most formidable obstacle to achieving an all-renewable scenario is simple: there’s just not enough land for the Bunyanesque quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to meet such a goal. The undeniable truth is that deploying wind energy and solar energy at the scale required to replace all of the energy now being supplied by nuclear and hydrocarbons would require covering state-sized chunks of territory with turbines and panels.

Proof of that comes from a 2017 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a group of prominent American scientists. The paper by Chris Clack — a mathematician who has held positions at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado — and 20 other top scientists, thoroughly debunked the idea of an all-renewable energy economy.

Clack’s paper debunks the arguments of Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford engineering professor whose claims about the economic and technical viability of a 100-percent renewable energy system have been widely circulated. In 2015, Jacobson published a paper, co-written with Mark Delucchi, a research engineer at the University of California-Berkeley, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, which claimed to offer “a low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem” with 100-percent renewables, went on to win the Cozzarelli Prize, an annual award handed out by the National Academy of Sciences. A Stanford web site said that Jacobson’s paper was one of six chosen by “the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the more than 3,000 research articles published in the journal in 2015.”

In the months following the publication of Jacobson’s award-winning paper, Clack and his colleagues studied the paper’s assertions and concluded that the numbers did not add up. In their 2017 paper reviewing Jacobson’s claims, Clack and his co-authors, who included Dan Kammen of the University of California-Berkeley, former EPA Science Advisory Board Chair Granger Morgan, and Jane Long of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, concluded that Jacobson’s work contained “numerous shortcomings and errors.” The paper also used “invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” Those errors, “render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100-percent wind, solar, and hydroelectric power system.”

Among the biggest errors is that Jacobson and Delucchi overstated the ability of the U.S. to increase its hydropower output by a factor of ten. While that was a significant error, the most obvious flaw in Jacobson’s scheme involves the massive amount of land his plan would require. Jacobson’s plan would require installing nearly 2.5 terawatts (2.5 trillion watts) of wind energy capacity, with the majority of that amount onshore. That’s a staggering quantity. Recall that in 2016, the entire installed electric-generation capacity in the US, of all types — coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar — totaled about 1 terawatt.

Clack and his colleagues found that to accommodate all of the wind turbines needed to achieve Jacobson’s all-renewable vision would require “nearly 500,000 square kilometers, which is roughly 6 percent of the continental United States and more than 1,500 square meters of land for wind turbines for each American.”

But even Clack’s figure of 500,000 square kilometers — an area larger than the state of California — may understate the actual amount of territory needed to accommodate the enormous amount of wind energy required for an all-renewable energy system. In 2018, Lee Miller, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and David Keith, a physics professor at Harvard, published a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Miller and Keith looked at 2016 energy-production data from 1,150 solar projects and 411 onshore wind projects. The wind projects in the study had a combined capacity of 43,000 megawatts, or roughly half of all US wind capacity in 2016. They found that solar panels produce about 10 times more energy per unit of land as wind turbines. That finding alone makes their paper significant. But it was their analysis of wind energy’s paltry power density that makes it newsworthy. Here’s how Miller explained it to the Harvard Gazette: “[W]e found that the average power density — meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant — was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts.” The problem, Miller said, is that most estimates of wind energy’s potential ignore “wind shadow” — that is how air flow through a given turbine disrupts the air flowing to turbines downwind of it.

Miller and Keith determined that “meeting present-day U.S. electricity consumption, for example, would require 12 percent of the continental U.S. land area for wind.” A bit of math reveals what that 12 percent figure means. The land area of the continental US is about 2.9 million square miles, or 7.6 million square kilometers. Twelve percent of that area would be about 350,000 square miles or 912,000 square kilometers. Therefore, merely meeting America’s current electricity needs would require a territory more than two times the size of California. That much territory would be needed just to provide our electricity needs, and does not account for the liquid and gaseous fuels needed for transportation, home heating, and industry.

Before going further, I should note that Miller and Keith’s 2018 calculations are almost identical to those done by Vaclav Smil in his 2010 book Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate. Smil wrote that “relying on large wind turbines to supply all US electricity demand…require installing about 1.8 terawatts of new generating capacity,” which he explained, “would require 900,000 square kilometers of land — nearly a tenth of the country’s land, or roughly the area of Texas and Kansas combined.”

Miller and Keith’s paper is important for three reasons: First, it used real-world data, not models, to reach its conclusions. Second, it shows that wind energy’s power density is far lower than what has been claimed by the Department of Energy, the IPCC, and academics like Jacobson. Finally, Miller and Keith’s paper shows that wind energy cannot shrink its massive footprint. They write, “In summary, we find that while improved wind turbine design and siting have increased capacity factors (and greatly reduced costs) they have not altered power densities.” That conclusion is remarkable. Over the past two decades or so, manufacturers like Vestas, General Electric, and Siemens have invested untold millions of dollars improving the efficiency of the blades, gears, and generators they put on their turbines. They have also dramatically increased the size of their machines: the latest models stand about 800 feet (244 meters) tall. But even with those improvements, the industry has not been able to wring more electric energy out of the kinetic energy of the wind. In physics terms, the wind-energy business is running up against the Betz Limit, named for German physicist Albert Betz, which sets the theoretical maximum efficiency for a wind turbine. The newest and tallest wind turbines are coming close to this limit. From a practical on-the-ground standpoint, the power density of wind energy will forever be stuck at 0.5 to 1 watt per square meter.

The undeniable point is this: if the wind sector is to make major increases in its energy production, it must cover more and more land with more and more turbines. But as those turbines get taller and cover more land, the more people will see them and the more people will object because they don’t want them in their neighborhoods. Remarkably, that very point was made in late 2018 by, Anne Reynolds, the executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a trade association that represents the wind industry. During a conference on renewable energy, Reynolds told attendees “I personally think the arguments against wind energy are because people don’t want to see the turbines.”

While academic dissections of the problems facing all-renewable scenarios are valuable, observers need not comb through obscure journals to understand why all-renewable scenarios are problematic. They only need to look at the hundreds of rural villages, towns, and counties that are fighting the encroachment of the wind industry. That backlash can be seen from Montauk to Santa Monica and Ontario to Loch Ness.