Big Renewables, Big Mistakes

Scaling up wind and solar energy will come with significant growing pains

MTheiler CC BY SA4.0

Renewables are the golden child of the energy world. Given their modularity, green energy has seemed nimbler and more adaptive than building fossil fuel or nuclear plants. Prices have plummeted, and the renewable energy build out only seems to be accelerating.

Yet energy companies are now walking away from contracts to install large offshore wind projects, and others are asking for more money from state governments and utilities. Partly due to inflation and interest rates, and partly due to increased demand for materials and components driven by Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, costs have skyrocketed.

The problems aren’t limited to off-shore wind. And they suggest that scaling up renewable energy won’t be a smooth as we might have hoped it would be.

Some 10 gigawatts of Germany’s solar panels may be affected by a critical design flaw. The film that protects the back of the panel prematurely cracks, allowing water to seep in and potentially causing electrocution, fire, and electrical problems.

And consider the Suedlink, a 700 km high-voltage DC line connecting power from the windy north of Germany to the factories and population centers of the south. Initially estimated to cost 4.4 billion Euro and planned to be built by 2022, the project will come online in 2028 at the earliest and with a price tag of at least 10 billion Euros.

Much of the problem stems from public opposition to overhead powerlines. Like for similar projects around the globe, the massive cable will be laid underground. Putting anything in the Earth makes things a lot more expensive. A meter of this power wire weighs about 100 pounds, and will require a 10-foot diameter tunnel when it crosses the Elbe river. And, then there’s the uncomfortable fact that only 17 kilometers of the project has actually been publicly approved.

Whatever the cause, these are nuclear energy level delays, cost overruns, and design mistakes. What is happening to renewables?

Writing in 1992, David Collingridge surveyed several large technological failures: nuclear energy, the space shuttle, etc. He noticed a pattern to projects that failed to deliver and that came in over budget and past due. Frequently the size of technology was large; those involved rushed to scale up new ideas without sufficient experience or testing; the technologies were capital intensive, relying on specialized infrastructure and requiring years to build; and the culture of the organizations making the technology were filled with “yes men” who shunned criticism and disagreement. The evident likelihood of big mistakes, in Collingridge’s analysis, usually led firms to seek to make the public shoulder the financial risk. Big technology usually doesn’t get built absent big governmental subsidies.

In nuclear energy, reactor sizes went up an order of magnitude in a few large leaps, rather than small steps. Nobody took the meltdown risk created by big reactor cores seriously enough. And unexpected changes in regulation and public opinion struck during the long build time for this new generation of power plant. Budgets ballooned and reactor projects were either years behind schedule or completely abandoned. And the government had to step in to financially compensate for the risk of catastrophic meltdown.

The space shuttle was similar. The Department of Defense dominated the design discussion, but NASA also stuck rigidly to its own vision for a manned reusable rocket that would bolster its image in an era when fewer people cared about space exploration. The result was a shuttle that couldn’t be turned around fast enough and cost too much to launch. The pressure to try to overcome these limitations, eventually led to accidents that took the lives of several astronauts.  

In Collingridge’s analysis, we need technologies that are more forgiving of error, that better enable quick learning and adaptation. Rather than giant, they should be small and modular. Flexible technologies, moreover, use off-the-shelf parts and already establish infrastructure as much as feasible. They are quick to build, decommission, and redesign. And the organizations in charge of them recognize their collective ignorance, acting with a healthy degree of humility.

But wait. Aren’t most renewables modular? Solar panels can be swapped out, and turbines are far smaller than a conventional power plant. That’s true, but modularity is only one factor of many. Also, it’s more often now the case that, while an individual panel or turbine is relatively small, the entire project is gargantuan. The New Jersey offshore wind project, which Danish Orsted is ready to walk away from, is at the gigawatt scale. Thousands upon thousands of faulty solar panels were installed in Germany before design flaws were discovered. The supply chain for these technologies has become more specialized and, therefore, more liable to disruption.

Moreover, as nations try to rely more and more just on wind, water, and solar energy, gigantic energy transmission and storage projects are going to become necessary to provide electricity at the places and times that people actually want it. And the broadly shared sense of urgency (due to climate change) and the halo that surrounds renewable energy projects has crowded out even reasonable worries about the speed and scale of the energy transition. 

Renewables will no longer be the nimble and flexible technologies they once were. The honeymoon period is over. We’ll have to get over our infatuation with them and start learning to better deal with their realities, with inconvenient mistakes and costly oversights.

Collingridge’s analysis is less helpful in this regard. Reading his work, one gets the sense that he believed that we either embraced small, flexible technologies or accepted the reality of costly failures. The scale and speed at which nations want to build renewable energy makes neither of these approaches attractive.

That leaves the far more uncertain and thornier challenge of building organizations that are themselves smart and nimble enough to respond to the near certainty of error. But that’s going to be difficult to do as generous governmental subsidies create a bandwagon effect, as more and more firms try to cash in on what seems like easy green energy money. Renewable energy’s growing pains are probably going to get much worse before they get better.