From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (see update below)

A hat tip to the commenter on one of my posts who was kind enough to give me a heads-up as follows:

Mark BLR June 30, 2023 2:23 am

BP handed over the production of their “Statistical Review of World Energy” to an outfit called the “Energy Institute” at the end of last year.

They released the new version, with annual data updated to 2022, on Monday (4 days ago).

The latest (.xlsx) spreadsheet can be downloaded from the following URL :
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review/resources-and-data-downloads

Since I had the new data, I thought I’d update the following graphic that I made a few years ago, which only covered up to 2019.

Figure 1. The 2019 version of energy consumption.

When I put that out, people were saying things like “You don’t understand. Solar and wind are growing exponentially! Just wait a few years and you’ll see!”

So, having now waited a few years, here’s the 2022 version. This time I’ve split out fossil fuels as a separate line. I’ve also added a line for traditional biomass. All the data is from the BP spreadsheet linked above except traditional biomass, which is from Our World In Data.

Figure 2. The 2022 version, including traditional biomass and fossil fuels as separate lines.

There are some very interesting things about this graphic. First, all the solar and wind in the world combined doesn’t provide even a third of the energy we get from wood and dung.

Next, I can hear some people thinking “Wait a minute, what about all the nuclear and the hydroelectric? I’ve seen charts where they are much larger! Why is the violet line so near to the red line?”

Well, the simplest answer is … we’re being lied to. Those charts you’re thinking about only show the actual energy for fossil fuels. For fossil fuels alone, they report the real energy we use to heat our houses, cook our food, power our cars and factories, and all the rest.

But regarding all the other sources except fossil fuels, the nuclear, hydro, various renewables, and the rest, in every case the true energy numbers have all been multiplied by about two and a half.

Why? Well, here’s the explanation from the BP folks:

Figure 3. The explanation from BP about the “input-equivalent” method used to make nuclear and everything else but fossil fuels look bigger than they are.

But that “two and a half times reality” is just imaginary energy. You can’t use it to heat your house or run a factory. My graphics above show the actual energy consumed. And the truth is, nuclear provides less than 2% of our global energy needs, as does wind. And solar provides less than 1%.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Our World In Data on the subject.

Figure 4. Percentage of energy consumption by source. DATA SOURCE.

It’s worth noting that traditional biomass is second only to fossil fuels in providing us with our daily energy, and that fossil plus traditional biomass provide us with ~ 93% of all the energy we use.

(A word in passing—if you’d prefer to deal with real energy numbers rather than imaginary “input-equivalent” figures, look for the word “Consumption” in the description of the data. That’s the amount of energy that is actually consumed, not the “input-equivalent” fantasy figures that the alarmists like to quote.)

Here’s the rude reality. There’s no way we will get off of fossil fuels for decades and decades. And until we have a market-ready equally inexpensive replacement for fossil fuels, all that fighting against them will do is increase energy costs, and that will assuredly screw the poor today …

And while screwing the poor today in the false hope of helping them in the year 2050 isn’t a crime … perhaps it should be. Because here’s the direction the lunacy is going.

Figure 5. Investment in solar energy and fossil fuels, 2013 and 2023

The IEA people are celebrating this, thinking it’s a big win for renewables … but here is the 2023 investment in fossil fuels and solar per 2023 kilowatt-hour of energy consumed from each source:

Figure 6. 2023 investment in fossil fuels and solar energy, per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy consumed by each source.

We’re spending far more on solar than the real-world sale price … “cheapest form of energy”, my okole …

Here’s another way to consider the insanity. According to the Manhattan Institute, we’ve spent $5 trillion on wind, solar, and biofuels in the last two decades. That works out to $0.18 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of wind + solar + biofuel energy consumed …

That subsidy alone is more than the US electricity sales price, which itself is jacked up by useless renewable sources. Many US states that run on coal and gas charge about $0.11 per kWh for electricity. Here in California, with lots of renewables, I pay $0.28 per kWh … grrrr.

Conclusion? We’re paying through the nose for useless, intermittent, unreliable renewable energy. After spending literally trillions of dollars on solar and wind, their combined contribution to the world energy situation is under two percent.

Under. Two. Percent.

Trivially small. Meaningless. Makes no difference. Lost in the noise.

But instead of admitting that and stopping the foolishness, politicians continue shoveling further billions of your and my money down a rathole and accomplishing … well …nothing.

Think of all the good we could actually have done with those five trillion dollars spent over two decades on meaningless renewables. That works out to six hundred and eighty million dollars per day, or two hundred fifty billion per year … the number of pressing real-world problems we could have solved with that amount of money is incalculable.

If you want a list of what the money could be spent on, you couldn’t do better than the Copenhagen Consensus’s list of 12 of the best investments we could make.

The 12 best investments for the world

The 12 best policies, our experts have identified, cover a wide range of areas: tuberculosis, education, maternal and newborn health, agricultural research and development, malaria, e-procurement, nutrition, land tenure security, chronic diseases, trade, child immunization and skilled migration.

These have both costs and benefits. The annual costs, as shown in the figure below, rise from $30 billion to almost $50 billion by the end of the decade, for an average cost of $41 billion per year. The 2030 cutoff just denotes the end of the SDG era — these policies would also be phenomenally efficient in the years and decades after. Indeed, for some of them, the researchers estimated the costs and benefits far beyond 2030, as indicated in the individual analyses.

These have both costs and benefits. The annual costs, as shown in the graph above, rise from $30 billion to almost $50 billion by the end of the decade, for an average cost of $41 billion per year. The 2030 cutoff just denotes the end of the SDG era — these policies would also be phenomenally efficient in the years and decades after. Indeed, for some of them, the researchers estimated the costs and benefits far beyond 2030, as indicated in the individual chapters.

That’s just one look at the difference $280 billion could make if spent wisely over the next seven years. 4.2 million lives saved, $1.1 trillion in economic benefits.

Instead, here’s all the difference the $250 billion dollars per year spent on solar, wind, and biofuels over the last two decades made to atmospheric CO2 levels, the CO2 “problem” that the trillions of wasted dollars are supposed to be solving.

Like I said … grrrr.

[UPDATE] Over at his substack, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has discussed the new BP data as follows:

The figure below shows that in 2022, more than 18% of total energy consumption came from non-fossil sources. That’s the highest it has been in my lifetime.

Over the past decade, carbon-free energy consumption has increased as a proportion of total consumption from less than 14% to above 18%.

However, he’s totally misrepresenting the situation. First, he’s not including traditional biomass, which is larger than all his “non-fossil” sources together.

Next, his “non-fossil sources” (hydro, nuclear, wind, biofuels, solar, geothermal, other) only total 7.5% of total energy, not 18%. See Figure 4 above for confirmation. He’s showing you the “input-adjusted” fake data.

Once we include traditional biomass (another “non-fossil source”) and use actual consumption figures rather than the “input-adjusted” nonsense, the trend in non-fossil sources looks like this:

I can’t comment on his substack because you have to be a subscriber, but I invite him to come here and discuss this question. If anyone knows him, could you please pass this invitation on to him?

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On a related subject, since I had the new BP data in front of me, I thought I’d take a look at the capacity factor for solar installations in various countries. The “capacity factor” is the ratio of the actual energy generation from a power source to the “nameplate” amount it generates at full power. For fossil and nuclear, this is on the order of 90% plus, meaning it generates full power about 90% of the time. Here are the capacity factors for grid-scale solar power by country.

Figure 5. Solar capacity factors by country.

Enjoy.

Here, it’s Sunday, my day off from house maintenance and endless mowing. Went to the coast this morning with the Gorgeous Ex-Fiancée. The Pacific was pacific indeed today—no waves, hardly a breath of wind. And as soon as I wrap up this post, gonna watch some béisbol, Giants vs. Mets. Life is good.

With wishes that you all have a life full of wonder,

w.