Mooney, Chris
punked?<div>
</div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/mark-jacobson-pnas-2454280135.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.ecowatch.com/mark-jacobson-pnas-2454280135.html</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EW</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Response to Forbes: Stop Inaccuracies—100% Renewable Energy Is Possible</b></font></font></font></font></div><div><b>
</b></div><div>This is a response to James Conca's article in Forbes on June 26, "Debunking the Unscientific Fantasy of 100% Renewables."</div><div>
</div><div>Conca's article describes a paper published in the Proceedings of the<b> National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Chris Clack and coauthors on June 19, criticizing a paper colleagues and I authored in the same journal in 2015</b>.<b> Our original paper showed that the U.S. can transition to 100% clean, renewable energy in all energy sectors without coal, nuclear power or biofuels. In this response, I show that Conca was negligent by not reporting on our response in PNAS and by seriously misrepresenting facts.</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conca's article starts with two misrepresentations. First, Conca points to the Clack critique in PNAS but nowhere does he mention that PNAS published our response to Clack equally and simultaneously. In fact, PNAS gave us the last words by not allowing Clack to respond to us. Our main conclusion, which PNAS published, was "The premise and all error claims by Clack et al. about Jacobson et al. are demonstrably false. We reaffirm Jacobson et al.'s conclusions." Conca did not report this.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Second, Conca states in the first sentence that "twenty-one prominent scientists issued a sharp critique," but fails to point out that Clack and coauthors' own disclosure published in their paper indicates that only three out of 21 coauthors performed any type of research for the article.</span> The remaining 18 did no research whatsoever, merely contributing to writing the paper. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Of the three authors who did perform research, one has admitted publicly, "I am not an energy expert"</span> (see 15 minutes and 32 seconds into this UCLA debate. In the meantime, our 100% clean, renewable energy peer-reviewed papers have collectively had more than 85 researcher-coauthors and more than 35 anonymous peer reviewers.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Third, as pointed out in our published response, there were zero mathematical modeling errors in our underlying model as claimed by Clack. This clarifies an inaccurate quote Conca attributes to me, "…there is not a single error in our paper." Not only did Conca never interview me to obtain such a quote, but the misquote is wrong on its face, since we acknowledge in our PNAS response (which Conca does not cite)</span> our failure to be clear in our paper about one particular assumption and our neglect of one cost. However, while we were not clear in our original paper, there was no underlying model error, contradicting Clack's major contention in his paper.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Specifically, in one instance, Clack falsely claimed we had a model error because he believed that a number in a table of ours was a maximum value when, in fact, the text clearly indicated that the number was an annual average number that varied in time, not a maximum number. Nowhere in the text was the word "maximum" used to describe that number. </span>Thus, Clack made up out of thin air the claim that the number was a maximum. Clack and all coauthors were informed their claim was an error through a document sent to him by us through PNAS prior to publication of their article but still refused to correct it. One must wonder what the motivation is of authors who are informed of an error yet refuse to correct it.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conca's article repeats another one of Clack's false claims. Namely, the claim that our goal of using 100% clean, renewable energy will increase costs if we exclude nuclear power and coal with carbon capture</span>, stating that our doing so is "at complete odds with serious analyses and assessments, including those performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the International Energy Agency and most of academia."</div><div>
</div><div><b>However, as stated in our PNAS-published response to Clack that Conca negligently fails to cite, the IPCC says the exact opposite: </b>"Without support from governments, investments in new nuclear power plants are currently generally not economically attractive within liberalized markets, ..." Further, unlike in our studies, neither the IPCC, NOAA, NREL, nor the IEA has ever performed or reviewed a cost analysis of grid stability with near 100% clean, renewable energy so could not possibly have come to the conclusion claimed by Conca.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Conca, then makes a misleading and irrelevant statement. He says that we "assume a nuclear war every 30 years or so." </b>The PNAS study he is criticizing says nothing of the sort. He fails to tell readers he is referring to a completely different paper that I wrote from 2009 that estimated the upper-limit risk of nuclear war from nuclear weapons proliferation. However, just like he negligently failed to report our response published in PNAS, Conca failed to report the lower-limit risk of nuclear war as stated in the 2009 paper, zero nuclear wars. Why would he report only the upper-limit of a risk rather than both the upper and lower-limit risks?</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conca then claims we assumed 15 million acres covered by wind and solar, which is wrong, but even if it were correct, he doesn't realize this is only 0.66% of U.S. land area to replace all fossil fuels. He forgets that the 1.7 million active and 2.3 million inactive oil and gas wells alone in the U.S. plus the 20,000 new ones each year occupy more than 1% of U.S. land area for the roads, well pads, and storage facilities.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conca then falsely claims we proposed to add new hydroelectric installations equivalent to 600 Hoover dams when our paper clearly calls for zero new dams. We propose only to increase the hydropower maximum discharge rate by adding turbines without increasing the annual hydropower energy output (thus no change in the annual amount of water in any reservoir)</span>. The concept of adding turbines to the outside of existing hydropower dams to increase the maximum discharge rate while keeping annual hydropower energy constant was a new idea that works. The legitimate question is, what is the maximum discharge rate that is practical relative to other options by 2050, not whether it is possible to increase the discharge rate.</div><div>
</div><div>Regardless, an alternate solution to increasing the hydropower discharge rate is to increase the discharge rate of concentrated solar power (CSP) and/or adding batteries. Both methods results in low-cost solutions as illustrated for the United States and Canada here. These results contradict Clack's premise that our nation's energy can't run 100% on wind, water and solar power alone at low cost.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conca further criticizes underground storage in rocks, but it is inexpensive (less than 1/300th the cost per unit energy stored than batteries)</span> and a form of district heat. Sixty percent of Denmark's heat is from district heating.</div><div>
</div><div>In sum, debate about our energy future can be constructive and is certainly encouraged. But inaccurate statements about scientific work and amplifications of those inaccuracies help no one. Had Conca read our PNAS response at all, he would not have made the errors he did. However, my colleagues and I are always seeking to improve our methods and calculations. Our goals are to better the quality of life of everyone by determining the best ways to provide clean, renewable, and reliable energy while creating jobs and improving people's health and reducing costs. Hopefully others share these goals, regardless of political party affiliation.</div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MIT rev</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"> Monday, a team of prominent researchers sharply critiqued an influential paper arguing that wind, solar, and hydroelectric power could affordably meet most of the nation’s energy needs by 2055, saying it contained modeling errors and implausible assumptions that could distort public policy and spending decisions (see “<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538451/fifty-states-plan-charts-a-path-away-from-fossil-fuels/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Fifty-States Plan Charts a Path Away from Fossil Fuels</a>”).</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">The <a href="http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2017/06/16/1610381114" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">rebuttal</a> appeared in the <em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;"><a href="http://www.pnas.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</a></em>, the same journal that ran the <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060.full.pdf?with-ds=yes" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">original 2015 paper</a>. Several of the nearly two dozen researchers say they were driven to act because the original authors declined to publish what they viewed as necessary corrections, and the findings were influencing state and federal policy proposals.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">The fear is that legislation will mandate goals that can’t be achieved with available technologies at reasonable prices, leading to “wildly unrealistic expectations” and “massive misallocation of resources,” says David Victor, an energy policy researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of the critique. “That is both harmful to the economy, and creates the seeds of a backlash.”</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">The authors of the earlier paper published an accompanying <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/PNASReplyClack.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">response</a> that disputed the piece point by point. In an interview with <em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">MIT Technology Review</em>, lead author Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, said the rebuttal doesn’t accurately portray their research. He says the authors were motivated by allegiance to energy technologies that the 2015 paper excluded.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">“They’re either nuclear advocates or carbon sequestration advocates or fossil-fuels advocates,” Jacobson says. “They don’t like the fact that we’re getting a lot of attention, so they’re trying to diminish our work.”</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">In the original paper, Jacobson and his coauthors heralded a “low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem.” It concluded that U.S. energy systems could convert almost entirely to wind, solar, and hydroelectric sources by, among other things, tightly integrating regional electricity grids and relying heavily on storage sources like hydrogen and underground thermal systems. Moreover, the paper argued, the system could be achieved without the use of natural gas, nuclear power, biofuels, and stationary batteries.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">“They do bizarre things,” says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of the rebuttal. “They treat U.S. hydropower as an entirely fungible resource. Like the amount [of power] coming from a river in Washington state is available in Georgia, instantaneously.”But among other criticisms, the rebuttal released Monday argues that Jacobson and his coauthors dramatically miscalculated the amount of hydroelectric power available and seriously underestimated the cost of installing and integrating large-scale underground thermal energy storage systems.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">In an e-mail, Jacobson stood firm on every conclusion in the original article: “There is not a single error in our paper.”</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Other models, including Kammen’s, do show that the U.S. can transition to nearly 100 percent zero-emissions energy technologies. But the established view among energy researchers is that it would require making use of nearly every major technology available and that the transition, particularly getting the last 20 percent or so of the way there, would be prohibitively expensive using existing technologies. One of the key missing pieces is affordable grid-scale storage that can efficiently power vast areas for extended periods when wind and solar sources aren’t available (see “<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608059/why-bad-things-happen-to-clean-energy-startups/?set=608129" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Why Bad Things Happen to Clean-Energy Startups</a>”).</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Various political and advocacy figures have embraced Jacobson’s ideas. Prior to the 2015 paper, he published a <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/fifty-states-renewables-022414.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">50-state plan</a> for moving to 100 percent renewables by midcentury, which he <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">says</a> contributed to decisions by both New York and California to enact laws requiring 50 percent renewable energy sources by 2030.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">He also cofounded a clean-energy advocacy group, <a href="http://thesolutionsproject.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">the Solutions Project</a>, whose board members include actor and activist Mark Ruffalo and commentator Van Jones. In late April, Senator Bernie Sanders co-wrote an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/29/bernie-sanders-climate-change-big-oil" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">op-ed</a> with Jacobson in the<em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;"> Guardian</em>, highlighting the 50-state research and trumpeting a <a href="https://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/press-releases/merkley-sanders-markey-booker-introduce-landmark-legislation-to-transition-united-states-to-100-clean-and-renewable-energy" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">bill</a> proposed that week that would move the United States to 100 percent clean energy by 2050</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">That could lead to spending public resources on the wrong technologies, underestimating the research and development still required, or abandoning sources that might ultimately be necessary to reach the stated goals.The authors of Monday’s rebuttal were quick to stress that cutting emissions as quickly as possible is a crucial goal. The concern is that paths for getting there will be wrong if they’re based on incorrect assumptions or miscalculations. Among other things, it can skew the public debate by suggesting it’s merely a question of marshaling political will, rather than achieving difficult technological breakthroughs and substantial cost reductions.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Notably, there is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/climate/nuclear-power-retirements-us-climate-goals.html?r=0" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">growing fear</a> that accelerating retirement schedules for the U.S. fleet of nuclear plants will make it increasingly difficult to make the transition to clean energy. While some interest groups remain opposed to the technology, many researchers believe it should be a crucial part of the energy mix, since it’s the only major zero-emissions source that doesn’t suffer from the intermittency issues plaguing solar and wind.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Lead author Christopher Clack, chief executive of Vibrant Clean Energy and a former NOAA researcher, described Jacobson’s accusation that the authors were acting out of allegiance to fossil fuels or nuclear power as “bizarre.” The 21 authors of the rebuttal, which <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/pnas/pdfs/pnas.201610381.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(249, 14, 30); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">features</a> a conflict-of-interest statement, include energy, policy, storage, and climate researchers affiliated with prominent institutions like Carnegie Mellon, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Brookings Institution, and Jacobson’s own Stanford.“Energy issues are complex and hard to understand, and Mark’s simple solution attracts many who really have no way to understand the complexity,” Jane Long, another coauthor and former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in an e-mail. “It’s consequently important to call him out.”</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Clack says he was motivated to oversee the additional peer-review process because he believed the earlier conclusions were wrong, and the authors refused to correct them. He added that the process took more than a year and went through two reviews by the journal’s editorial board.</p><p style="margin: -6px 0px 30px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-family: MillerText, serif; line-height: 1.63; max-width: 600px; width: 600px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">“We stayed the course because we believe it, and want the truth out there,” he says.</p></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mooney</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/19/a-bitter-scientific-debate-just-erupted-over-the-future-of-the-u-s-electric-grid/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/19/a-bitter-scientific-debate-just-erupted-over-the-future-of-the-u-s-electric-grid/</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no link</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Scientists are engaged in an increasingly bitter and personal feud over how much power the United States can get from renewable sources, with a large group of researchers taking aim at a popular recent paper that claimed the country could move beyond fossil fuels entirely by 2055.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 2015, Stanford professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues argued that between 2050 and 2055, the United States could be entirely powered by “clean” energy sources and “no natural gas, biofuels, nuclear power, or stationary batteries are needed.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That would be a massive shift from the current power makeup, as in 2016, the United States got only 6.5 percent of its electricity from hydropower, 5.6 percent from wind and 0.9 percent from solar. Nonetheless, the paper excited proponents of renewable energy, and has been embraced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, celebrity backers such actor Mark Ruffalo and many environmental groups.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But Jacobson’s idea was always contentious. And now, no fewer than 21 researchers have published a study in the influential Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (which also published Jacobson’s original study in 2015) arguing that the work “used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“We thought we had to write a peer reviewed piece to highlight some of the mistakes and have a broader discussion about what we really need to fight climate change,” said lead study author Christopher Clack, who is the founder of the firm Vibrant Clean Energy. “And we felt the only way to do it in a fair and unbiased way was to go through peer review, and have external referees vet it to make sure we’re not saying anything that’s untrue in our piece.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Clack is backed in the study by a number of noted colleagues including prominent climate research Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, energy researcher Dan Kammen of the University of California at Berkeley, and former EPA Science Advisory Board chair Granger Morgan.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In a simultaneous letter in the journal, meanwhile, Jacobson and three Stanford colleagues fire back that Clack’s critique is itself “riddled with errors” and “demonstrably false.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jacobson also argued that his critics are biased in favor of carbon-based fuels such as oil, gas and coal, as well as nuclear energy.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“They try to falsify this thing by claiming that there are errors. This is what really bothers me with this paper. I don’t have any problem with people trying to quibble with our assumptions.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The fight between researchers comes as the Trump administration has signaled it does not believe the nation’s electric grid can support a quick and thorough shift toward renewable energy, as Jacobson suggests that it can. As soon as this week, Energy Secretary Rick Perry is expected to release a study of the grid that renewable energy advocates fear will be used to criticize wind and solar and how they affect the grid.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The debate is crucial because, while it’s great to talk about wind and solar in theory, the reality is that the electrons that they generate have to be sent through wires and transmission stations to satisfy needs at particular places and at particular times — or else, we’ll have to come up with a way of storing electricity on a large scale, which remains a mostly unsolved problem right now.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">And critics have contended that while you can add some wind and solar to the grid without any problem, if you add too much, it can be destabilizing and the electric grid will always require some “baseload” sources of energy, such as nuclear or coal or gas, which generate power continuously, rather than intermittently depending upon the availability of the sun or the winds.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In a 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jacobson and his Stanford colleagues Mark Delucci, Mary Cameron and Bethany Frew laid out their clean energy vision. They used a model of the electric grid to show that the Lower 48 United States could be entirely powered by wind energy, solar power and hydroelectric energy, as long as there were various forms of energy storage available as well as “demand response,” in which major users of electricity are paid to curtail their use at key times when the grid is facing high demand.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The study also included a small role for geothermal energy and tidal and wave energy, the latter two of which are both fledgling technologies at this point.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Still, the study found that it could all work and, moreover, would be affordable. “The resulting 2050—2055 US electricity social cost for a full system is much less than for fossil fuels,” they wrote. The research, said Jacobson and his co-authors, should put to rest fears that adding large amounts of wind and solar to the grid would be destabilizing because these variable or “intermittent” sources of electricity would not always line up their production with the times when people need them most.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Particularly notable in the study was what Jacobson and his colleagues didn’t include — nuclear energy, which does not produce any greenhouse gases and runs 24/7 without intermittency issues; carbon capture and storage, which could help reduce the emissions from coal and natural gas plants; and bioenergy, which has also often been held out as critical to greening the electricity and transportation sectors.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But Clack and his colleagues contend that the study fails to prove that such a dramatic energy transition can be accomplished in an affordable way, in light of the constraints that occur when you have solar energy unavailable at night and wind energy also unavailable at certain times. They say it assumes a massive adoption of energy storage technologies that may not be feasible, and the possibility of huge volumes of hydroelectric generation.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The researchers actually suggest that 80 percent of the nation’s electricity could be produced without carbon dioxide in the future if you include nuclear energy and bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage to sequester the emissions from the burning of biomass. But their conclusion on the Jacobson study is quite blunt.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“The study’s numerous shortcomings and errors render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100% wind, solar, and hydroelectric power system,” they write. “It is one thing to explore the potential use of technologies in a clearly caveated hypothetical analysis; it is quite another to claim that a model using these technologies at an unprecedented scale conclusively shows the feasibility and reliability of the modeled energy system implemented by midcentury.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jacobson has, in turn, published a response in the journal and shared a line-by-line rebuttal to the study. In addition to his objections to how they have characterized his work, he adds that the authors are more focused on cutting carbon dioxide emissions than other social benefits that he and his co-authors care about. “We’re interested in air pollution, health, energy security, nuclear weapons proliferation, reducing the risk to society of all the dangerous considerations,” he said.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But Jacobson also suggests that he is being unfairly treated, writing, in a rebuttal he shared with The Washington Post, that “Clack’s analysis is riddled with intentional misinformation.” For instance, the critique asserts that Jacobson assumed that hydroelectric dams would have the capacity to generate over 1,000 gigawatts, or billion watts, of electricity, vastly more than exists today. Jacobson counters that that’s because the paper assumes that dams would add turbines, but only for peak usage; their average usage would still be much lower.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“They’re trying to make it as if it’s a model error,” said Jacobson. “And I have to respond to dozens of reporters who think that because they claim that it’s an error, it’s actually an error. It’s just ridiculous.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Clack counters that it is indeed an error, “plain and simple.” “This notion that you can install 10 times the generating capacity at existing dams is a nonsense, because studies have been done to show that there is only about 12GW of capability for that in the US,” he said by email. There are numerous similarly complex claims and counterclaims at issue in the debate — which is part of the problem, says David Victor, an energy policy researcher at the University of California at San Diego and one co-author of the new critique.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“These are studies that seem to be anchored technically, lots of complexity to them, all of which point to the idea that the problem is solvable with a set of options that are frankly politically very palatable,” he said of Jacobson’s studies. That, says Victor, is why the research has been so influential.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Our analysis suggests … that none of that work holds up,” Victor said. “So I can totally understand that emotions are high, but we have a duty as scientists to call the facts as we see them.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Christopher Clack was previously with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory and the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences while authoring the paper, but now works with Vibrant Clean Energy. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ref <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">December 8, 2015 </font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>vol. 112 no. 49 </div></div></div></div>