I haven’t read Fossil Future, but it sounds like he’s ignoring the option of combining solar and wind with batteries (and other types of electrical storage, like pumped water). The technology is available today and can be more easily deployed than fossil fuels at this point.
If you only have solar + wind + batteries, you have a problem when you have a week of bad weather. Batteries can effectively move energy that’s produced at noon to the night but they are not cost effective for charging batteries in summer to be used in bad months in the winter.
While I think Epstein’s treatment of solar/wind and batteries is too brief, his main points are:
Large portions of the energy we need have nothing to do with the grid. Specifically, transportation (global shipping, flight) and industrial process heat (to make steel, concrete, etc.) comprise a large percentage of our energy needs and solar/wind are pretty useless (far too inefficient) for meeting those needs.
Epstein also points out that replacing current fossil fuels with solar/wind + batteries will require massive amounts of a) batteries, b) transmission lines, and c) solar and wind farms, which the environmental movement seem to oppose locally whenever possible. Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean we’re capable, as a society, of deploying it at scale.
I haven’t read Fossil Future, but it sounds like he’s ignoring the option of combining solar and wind with batteries (and other types of electrical storage, like pumped water). The technology is available today and can be more easily deployed than fossil fuels at this point.
If you only have solar + wind + batteries, you have a problem when you have a week of bad weather. Batteries can effectively move energy that’s produced at noon to the night but they are not cost effective for charging batteries in summer to be used in bad months in the winter.
While I think Epstein’s treatment of solar/wind and batteries is too brief, his main points are:
Large portions of the energy we need have nothing to do with the grid. Specifically, transportation (global shipping, flight) and industrial process heat (to make steel, concrete, etc.) comprise a large percentage of our energy needs and solar/wind are pretty useless (far too inefficient) for meeting those needs.
Epstein also points out that replacing current fossil fuels with solar/wind + batteries will require massive amounts of a) batteries, b) transmission lines, and c) solar and wind farms, which the environmental movement seem to oppose locally whenever possible. Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean we’re capable, as a society, of deploying it at scale.