THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF SOLAR/WIND ENERGY

Did you know yesterday was Super Tuesday II?  Not that it mattered, but both Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially are now their party's choice to run on November 5.  Of all the ironies, Hawaii, the state that never votes electorally for Donald Trump, almost pushed him over the line to officially make him the Republican primary victor.  However, Washington was that state.

By the way, Georgia Judge Scott McAfee just announced that 6 of the 41-count indictment returned by the Fulton County grand jury in August must be quashed.  These were not all that critical, and a lot more is left for Trump and his cronies to worry about.  McAfee reiterated that he will announce his decision on Friday about the fate of Fani Willis.  The nation awaits the televised trial of Donald Trump.  Remember Trump's mug shot?  Done in Georgia.

Oh, one more political matter.  GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado not only will not run for re-election, he will quit at the end of next week, leaving Speaker Mike Johnson with only 2 defections to run the House.  The Republican margin will be 218-213.  Said Buck:

We’ve taken impeachment and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept. This place keeps going downhill and I don’t need to spend more time here.

About the topic of the day, like the trials and tribulations of Donald Trump, renewable energy too has had its ups and downs.

• When the energy crises hit in 1970, there was no industry in wind turbines and solar photovoltaics.
• Then when Congress passed laws to develop them, the initial costs were too high.
• 

  I've all along the way did what I could to advance research progress, but experienced difficulty in just attempting to proceed.  The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) was prevalent.
• Geothermal energy was essentially curtailed in Puna on the Big Island by environmentalists.

• 
  Wind power got stalled by people living close by, and even the Audubon Society, for there were dead birds.
• Even a solar photovoltaic facility on Kauai was delayed by naysayers. What was their argument?  Don't remember.  Anything new then was suspected, I guess.

I began my renewable energy career after graduating from college in 1962.  I was a biomass engineer, a trainee in a sugar factory.  Hutchinson Sugar Company in that red Kau portion of the Big Island of Hawaii, a rather isolated spot on earth, for we could not even get radio signals.  Also worked on Kauai where our backyard was the spot where Bloody Mary sang Happy Talk in the movie South Pacific.  Spent seven years with C. Brewer.

The company paid my salary to get a master's degree, but I had to go to Louisiana State University in their sugar program, the only advanced institution in the world with this option.  The program was part of a sprawling chemical engineering department (second largest in the nation), so I got approval to stay on for a PhD in biochemical engineering.  Upon graduation in 1972 was hired by the College of Engineering at the University of Hawaii.  Started a research program in geothermal energy, and when the first Energy Crisis came in 1972, added solar and wind energy.  Taught a couple of renewable energy special courses and before I went to work for Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC in 1979, I co-authored a book, Solar/Wind Handbook for Hawaii.  

While in the U.S. Senate for three years, 1979-1982, I drafted original legislation in hydrogen and ocean thermal energy conversion, and was the lead staff for the first wind energy bill that passed through Congress.  Returning to Hawaii, I became director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii in the mid-1980s, and served in this role until I retired in 1999.

When the first energy crisis came in 1973, the price of oil jumped, than leaped again in 1979 in the second energy crisis.  By then I was working in the U.S. Senate (yes, same photo, but that's the only one I have), and the field of renewable energy was in its infancy.  It's almost remarkable how well both solar and wind energies have since done in the marketplace.  Three good reasons why:  

• Green energy is good for the environment.
• Global warming is caused by fossil fuels.
• Danger of nuclear war, storage of radioactive wastes and cataclysmic nuclear power plant problems.
• The cost of the renewables have plummeted, while nuclear, coal, natural gas and petroleum prices have increased.

However, as sensible as it was, it has not been easy to install renewable energy systems.  The Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) attitude has prevented deployment of solar/wind farms and geothermal fields, while environmental activists have stopped the advance of OTEC.  Even biomass has recently gained negative publicity.

Now, I hear, the rooftop solar industry could be on the verge of collapse.

• While studies show that rooftop solar with battery storage can someday meet residential electricity demand, the field might have been oversold by government tax credits.
• First, while prices for the photovoltaic cells have dropped, there are labor costs.  Plus the selling field has overpromised and misrepresented financing.
• In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, six times more than the previous three years combined.  A 100 more will soon fail.
• 
  The two largest companies, SunRun and Sunnova, posted huge losses in their recent quarterly reports, and shares are down more than 80% from the January 2021 peak.  Both have had to resort to to troubling sales practices, featuring lies and exaggerations.
• Because initial costs are high, most homeowners turned to leasing the PV system.  These companies sold the 30% federal tax credit benefit and these assets to companies like Google and Goldman Sachs to fund further growth.  These firms also looked good in their portfolios to look climate-friendly.
• Recent state legislation allowed utility companies to reduce price paid to these residences sending power back to the grid.
• Growth was 40% in 2022, but will drop to 12% this year.  When these new expectations financial plans began to collapse.
• Prices from China tend to undercut the competition.
• European companies too are having problems.

As much as China is having economic problems, the renewables are doing well.  

• The China problem would be worse if not for the renewables.
• The country's solar/wind output will finally this year outpace the electricity generated from coal.
• Amazingly enough, in 2023 alone, China added more solar panels than the U.S. HAS EVER DEPLOYED.

Rarely should anyone install a wind mill at home, and residential PV is poorly transitioning into the future, but what about utilities-scale farms?  Somewhat similar problems are also occurring here.  Read this.  Noise from wind turbines, dead birds/bats, and maybe just the aesthetics are causing a backlash of support.

With all the bad news about the renewables, progress is occurring here and there..

• The ten largest wind farms are led by the Gansu Wind Farm with a capacity of 10 GW (10,000 MW, about as large as 10 nuclear powerplants), which will double in the years to come.
• #2 is in the UK and #3 in India.
• #4 is the 2,042  MW Wind Prime Farm in Iowa.  Cooperatively owned solar systems are taking off in California and Texas.
• Taiwan and Australia are in the top ten.
• 
  Note the term difference, for wind uses farm and solar uses park.  The ten largest in the world.
• #1    Golmud Solar Park in China's Longyuan Power Group, 2,800 MW.
• #2    Bhadlar Solar Park in India's Thar Desert, 2,700 MW.
• #3    Pavagada Solar Park, India, 2,050 MW.
• #4    Mohammed Bin Rashid Maktoum Solar Park, UAE, 1,630 MW.
• #5    Benban Solar Park, Egypt,  soon to be 1,800 MW, but potential is 6,300 MW.

Some history.

• In the 1980s the USA produced the first silicon cells for electricity.
• However, fossil-fuel firms like Exxon decided to expand oil instead of developing the renewables.
• Tax credits for green power picked up with the Obama administration.  But in a way, this caused part of the problem, because it turns out that our labor costs and lack of basic minerals could not compete with China, and American companies went bankrupt.
• Remember too that both solar and wind are not reliable energy, for the sun comes and goes, while sometimes there is no wind.  Energy storage made inroads, but batteries are just too expensive.

I can go on and on, but will close with this long quote from Slate, for it well explains the current transitional problem.

It seems pretty apparent, on both sides of the Atlantic, that a strategy of throwing cash at small-scale manufacturers—without providing more top-down insurance and support for less-resourced firms, without establishing wide-scale job-training and just-transition programs, without careful coordination among cooperative, local, national, and international authorities—has helped create the energy transition economy while leaving it fatally susceptible to shocks and changes. America’s rooftop-solar mess demonstrates that, while private enterprise can be a player in greening global energy, it cannot be solely relied upon to complete the task with some government funds in its pocket. To leave a necessary energy transition to the directives of the profit motive, just because China helped to cheapen the price of solar supply and generation, is to abandon smaller solar companies to the weirdness of a still-growing, often-speculative market. It also expects that more-capitalized private firms or utilities will care about producing and maintaining solar systems for altruistic reasons—even though private equity’s rooftop misadventures show this to be a lie. The future of a healthy, stable clean-energy industry should be spurred by publicly stewarded, communitarian projects, with more intensive government support for training, setup, installation, power pricing, maintenance, and recycling (and batteries!). Plus, accountability for those companies that benefit from state incentives only to abandon solar when it’s no longer in their interest.

Can't close without a few more pokes at Donald Trump, who hates wind energy.

Why would he say this?  Here.

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