There is No Alternative!
Mark Jacobson and the misuses of energy system modeling
“Study finds world can switch to 100% renewable energy [RE] and earn back its investment in just 6 years.” In a media system evermore saturated with dismal stories predicting impeding climate catastrophe, headlines like these are a relief. But can such studies actually deliver what they promise?
Trying to prove that we can power the world with only wind, water, and solar has been Stanford professor Mark Jacobson’s life’s work, and it’s heavily disputed. His models are very complicated arrays of projections, assumptions, extrapolations, and other calculations, not unexpected for an attempt to analyze the entirety of national and global electrical system. It’s obviously a passion project, and Jacobson hasn’t exactly been receptive to people who question it. So incensed was he by criticism suggesting that his 2015 study was fatally flawed that he actually tried to sue the National Academy of Sciences, arguing that published commentary amounted to defamation.
Stanford’s Mark Jacobson
Although my background is in mathematics, I don’t know enough about energy systems or the kind of analysis Jacobson employs to judge his model. Still, his detractors appear to voice reasonable concerns. People who live in the places he models note the latter’s incongruence with physical reality, like high estimates of hydro storage capacity in an evidently non-hilly Finland. My beef with Jacobson’s modeling isn’t about whether it is wrong or not, but its politics. Modeling is a great way to sneak in values behind a façade of science, behind claims of authoritativeness. Worst of all, RE advocates use 100 percent RE models to stifle debate about America’s energy future rather than expand it.
“Paper” Energy Grids
We can’t actually know if Jacobson et al. are correct. Any attempt to develop a scenario for America’s (or the world’s) entire energy grid is going to be based on a ton of tricky assumptions and extrapolations. Critics point out problems with modeling power flow, questionable assumptions about infrastructure costs, and overly simplistic spreadsheet models. That doesn’t mean that world RE models are useless, but that their proper role in decision making is rather limited, for they merely suggest that a 100 percent renewable scenario might be possible.
An example of 100% renewable proposals
This isn’t a problem limited to energy system scenario building. Nuclear energy pioneer Hyman Rickover was known to emphasize the differences between “paper” or academic reactors and ones that actually get built. All sorts of technical possibilities seem feasible, until we go through the trouble to try to make it reality. Jacobson constructs “paper” energy systems. Will they work? We won’t know until we gain much more experience with deploying wind, water, and solar technologies at the kinds of scales he advocates. As notable empiricist philosopher Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
But Jacobson’s modeling is not portrayed as humble scientific work that may describe one possible future. It gets transformed into “The Future.” RE advocates use it to declare that there are no technical or economic barriers to a fully RE world energy system, but merely a lack of “political will.” Jacobson himself does little to correct this misunderstanding. His recent book is entitled No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Planet…, which projects a level of confidence that many, especially Jacobson’s critics, would consider unwarranted.
As notable empiricist philosopher Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
One recent point of contention is whether to keep California’s Diablo Canyon plant up and running. Jacobson recently tweeted that keeping the plant open would cost Californian’s $45 billion, enough to buy twenty times the capacity in solar and wind. Combined with Jacobson’s claims about 100 percent renewable, the implication is that nuclear is a, “miracle technology”, an expensive distraction from solving the carbon emissions problem.
But is that really the case? It is not at all clear whether purchasing twenty times the nameplate capacity of wind and solar adequately replaces what Diablo Canyon provides, given that there’s a whole lot of other infrastructure involved in delivering RE power and making it available when people actually need it. Neither Jacobson, nor the Environmental Working Group study he cites, provide the reader with an apples to apples comparison. It is implied rather than demonstrated that Californians would be wasting their money keeping the plant open. We would want to be very careful before abandoning a still-functioning power plant, more careful than a back of the envelope calculation of replacement cost and a study from an environmental NGO.
Politicized Futurism
A lack of carefulness is all too typical in politically charged debates about technology. Overconfidence abounds among both advocates and detractors, because energy technologies aren’t mere technical things but also center cultural stories. There’s a narrative that exists around each one. They embody the hopes (and the politics) of different groups. The science can’t be separated from storytelling. Amory Lovins’ promotion of decentralized renewable technologies hasn’t just been about addressing climate change but about his communitarian vision for society, one distrustful of the large bureaucracies needed to make nuclear energy work.
And no one can seem to agree how much nuclear energy actually costs. Lazard levelized costs of energy figures show that renewables have a big cost advantage. But some analysts argue that those figures don’t take into sufficient account the extra costs of intermittency, transmission, and storage, finding instead that nuclear is far cheaper than solar and wind.
It is as if we believe that winning the scientific debate gives us the power to make our preferred society into reality
Disagreement is to be expected for a such a complex topic. But that imperfect and limited cost estimates get cited as authoritative fact, and that many people resist wading into the messy details behind estimates, reflects the power of competing stories regarding nuclear energy, regardless of whether it is a lofty vision of a “nuclear renaissance” or a more catastrophic one. Otherwise, more of us would more readily admit that we weren’t actually sure what the future should hold.
For most contemporary political issues, neither side wants to acknowledge the story in the background, the collection of desires, interests, and aspirations that make some futures look more attractive than others. We prefer to pretend that we are simply motivated by the cold hard facts, by truths that elude our opponents.
It is as if we believe that winning the scientific debate gives us the power to make our preferred society into reality, and often our opponents are equally afraid that it does. This is why seemingly wonky and esoteric technical debates are so heated, why Jacobson dismisses critical nuclear advocates as “non-experts” and they, in turn, declare his research to be “ideological.”
Even zee Germans can’t resist “There is no alternative” politics
It is discomforting to the wrestle with the reality that we can’t actually know America’s correct energy future right now. The history of technology is filled with dead ends, wrong turns, and unintended consequences. While lofty visions of the future can be inspirational, really our focus is best placed on questions like “What’s our next step?”, “Which paths should stay open?”, and “How long to follow any one technology?.” What’s the next increment? And how can we learn about it quickly enough to follow up a step in the right direction?
Nuclear energy might only seem like a dead end, because we’ve focused on the wrong paths. Just like how many renewable technologies were more or less impractical until the last decade, it might just be that the right technical pathways within nuclear fission remain underexplored. This is why trying to “prove” that America (or the world) can and should have a 100 percent renewable grid in twenty years is more a politicized form of futurism than science.
The late UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher often claimed “There is no alternative!” to the neoliberal market system she preferred, a move meant to quash disagreement about economic policy. The seeming urgency of the climate problem motivates a similar distaste for dissent. Achieving Jacobson’s 100 percent renewable future on the timescale he advocates means everything else gets looked at as only a waste of precious time and money. But that viewpoint ignores what we do and don’t know about the potential of competing technologies. It is a sentiment similar to Thatcher’s, that “science” can determine an indisputable (technological) future, an unquestionable truth that we reject only at our peril. There is no energy alternative!