The following clip comes from POWERING EARTH 2050: Is California’s 100% Renewable Strategy Globally Viable?. The speakers are Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson of the Stanford University Precourt Institute for Energy and Oliver Morton, Briefings Editor for The Economist.

This a brief sample of why more people need to question Mark Z. Jacobson as a source of reliable information about electrical power sources and electricity transmission and distribution systems.

I cannot understand why his work has been so heavily promoted by the prestigious university where he works. I also don’t comprehend why his colleagues seem reluctant to express the same doubts about his assumptions, methods and results in public that they do in private conversations.

Aside: I might buy an argument about professional courtesy, but during my professional career, I worked in an environment where respectful deference goes both ways. Once someone drops the gloves and attacks the credibility of others, it’s open season. Professional courtesy is also not an excuse for avoiding forceful backup when someone is steering the ship directly towards shoal water at a high rate of speed. End Aside.

Here is a full transcript of the above clip.

Mark Jacobson: The Arctic ice is disappearing so rapidly that it may be gone entirely in 15-20 years. So they want us to wait around and hopefully develop some miracle technology that’s going to come around and save us when the Arctic is disappearing below our feet and we have solar and wind that can be deployed…

Oliver Morton: Okay Mark. Can I just come in on that? Do you really think that there’s a deployment pathway that can do anything in a 15 year time scale to things like this? I mean you’re just talking about the ice; that there’s not enough time. My understanding, and I know there are people more expert than me on the panel, is that there’s a fair amount of inertia in the system and stuff that you do now is not going to change something in 10, 15, 20 years.

Jacobson: Well, this is why we need aggressive policy measures. Certainly last year in Europe 100% of all new electric power was wind, water and solar. In the United States, 70% was. Wind is the cheapest form of electricity right now and solar is the second — utility scale solar and onshore wind — are the cheapest form of electricity in the United States today, despite these claims about their subsidies.

The unsubsidized cost of wind is 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour, the subsidized cost is around 2 cents a kilowatt hour. Nuclear, the unsubsidized cost is 12.4 cents per kilowatt hour according to Lazard 9.0 — its 2015 cost of energy. Everybody can look it up; these are the cost of energy.

So we definitely think that we can, if we have aggressive policies. Otherwise, yeah, it’s going to take forever. So we need…

Morton: Because with aggressive policies you can change the climate in 15 years?

Jacobson: No. Not the climate. We can change the energy… The climate will lag, but we’ll start to get there by doing the best we can. You can only do the best you can. I mean you can’t…

Morton: And how do you feel about the other approaches to modeling? There’s a paper by Kevin Anderson recently in Nature Climate Change saying that the only ways to get well below 2 ℃ are to either have negative emissions or to have a time machine and go back in time to get… The integrated assessment modeling community seems to have a very different view than what you put forward on what’s possible. Can you just explain why those views are so different?

Jacobson: Yeah. Because I’ve built, for the last 26 years my career is climate modeling. I built from scratch a climate model and air pollution health model at UCLA, right here, starting here. So we simulate with this model, we actually put in all… We developed plans for 139 countries; wind and solar, existing water and other technologies. We put them in the model. Accounts for the feedback of two wind turbines, changes of kinetic energy due to the extraction of power and extraction of solar energy. We develop time series of wind and solar resources and then we look at the CO2 resources that come out of the atmosphere due to the shutting down of all these plants. And I have the simulation, I have a plot I can show you up here of all the IPCC scenarios and our scenarios with 80% conversion by 2030 and 100% by 2050 we get down to 250 parts per million by 2100 using our scenarios.

Nobody else has looked at these scenarios. Except there are studies that do just cutting off all emissions, and they agree, you do decrease your CO2 in the atmosphere. Whether that translates into temperature is a different issue because there are aerosols as well.

But these models that are used for the IPCC scenarios, the problem with them is in order to run for thousands of years they are so simplified they take out most of the physics and the chemistry and the cloud microphysics that are included in the model that I developed over 26 years.

Morton: Did you say down to 250 parts per million?

Jacobson: Sorry, 350. [laughter]

In combination with his opening statement from the same debate, this short clip reveals why Dr. Jacobson’s models produce such wildly absurd proposals as his plan to supply Finland with sufficient “wind, water, and solar” to provide 100% of its power needs.

As a backbone of our energy system Mark Jacobson and his accomplices grant Finland 29 GW capacity of onshore windpower, 27 GW offshore, and almost 50 GW of photovoltaics. For reference notice that our maximum electricity demand is around 14GW in the winter and 9 GW in the summer. Total energy consumption is somewhat less than 400 TWh. In size we are about 1% of EU which has around 90GW of photovoltaics installed. So according to Mark on a windy sunny day production could be more than 10 times our demand and around 7 times the maximum (winter) demand. Our installed PV capacity would be comparable to whole PV capacity in EU today which has, after all, spent around 10 years constructing it. This all seems a bit intimidating.

(Source: Part 1: Why does Mark Jacobson hate Finland?

The root cause of the problem is that Jacobson relies on a detailed, creatively original climate model that he has been refining for the past 26 years, apparently without too much input or agreement from people that disagree with him. “Nobody else has looked at these scenarios.”

He then uses his climate model to determine how a mixture of wind, water and solar energy collectors can, in total, produce 40% less energy each hour than the conservatively estimated power demand in 2050 published by the Energy Information Agency. His explanation for producing less energy than the EIA expects society will need is that electrical machinery is that much more efficient than combustion machinery.

The reason for emphasizing that Dr. Jacobson describes his model as a climate model is that it is not an energy production system model, not an economic model, and not a production scheduling model. The characteristics of power system components like generators, transformers, HVDC conversion stations, transmission lines, transmission towers, network operating centers, and numerous less visible but no less important components are treated in generalized, almost cartoon form.

His cost and schedule estimates are substantially less credible than hand waving; they amount to something like the following: “I have no earthly idea what my ideas are going to cost and how they are going to be planned, scheduled and implemented, but trust me, I know this will be cheaper. All we need to do for comparison is to include all of the invisible gains society will receive when we stop burning fossil fuels and biomass.”

Here are some additional specific issues from the above debate clip, where Dr. Jacobson makes several inaccurate, defensive, or deceptive statements.

The Arctic ice is disappearing so rapidly that it may be gone entirely in 15-20 years.

Among estimates of when the Arctic will be ice free, this is one of the shortest, but Jacobson is not completely alone.

So they want us to wait around and hopefully develop some miracle technology that’s going to come around and save us when the Arctic is disappearing below our feet and we have solar and wind that can be deployed…

No one in the debate suggested waiting or developing some miracle technology. Shellenberger and Caldeira advocated a path forward that does not exclude any existing technologies, especially nuclear energy.

Of the available ultra-low carbon dioxide emitting technologies, it is the one that least needs a miracle in order to deploy and decarbonise substantial portions of the existing energy system. No one in the debate argued against deploying wind and solar, although there were some suggestions that it’s time for them to prove they can be deployed even without large direct subsidy payments from taxpayers or ratepayers.

Certainly last year in Europe 100% of all new electric power was wind, water and solar.

That statement is not true. Here is a quote from page 6 of European wind energy Association (EWEA) report titled Wind in Power: 2015 European statistics

In 2015, 28.9 GW of new power generating capacity was installed in the EU, 2.4 GW more than in 2014. Wind power was the energy technology with the highest installation rate in 2015: 12.8 GW, accounting for 44% of all new installations. Solar PV came second with 8.5 GW (29% of 2015 installations) and coal third with 4.7 GW (16%). Gas installed 1.9 GW (6.4 % of total installations), CSP 370 MW (1.3%), hydro 238.5 MW (0.8%), biomass 232.4 MW (0.8%), waste 118.5 MW, nuclear 100 MW, geothermal 4.3 MW and ocean 4.1 MW. Peat and fuel oil did not install any capacity in 2015.

Dr. Jacobson then made the following statement.

Wind is the cheapest form of electricity right now and solar is the second — utility scale solar and onshore wind — are the cheapest form of electricity in the United States today, despite these claims about their subsidies. The unsubsidized cost of wind is 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour, the subsidized cost is around 2 cents a kilowatt hour. Nuclear, the unsubsidized cost is 12.4 cents per kilowatt hour according to Lazard 9.0 — its 2015 cost of energy. Everybody can look it up; these are the cost of energy.

Jacobson is right; we can all look up the study/brief that he referenced during the debate. The chart on page 2 of that document suggests that Jacobson is correct — if you are like me and do not count energy efficiency as a source of energy. The items with costs farthest to the left (cheapest) are onshore wind and utility scale solar (both crystalline and thin film.)

Jacobson does not mention that the range for onshore wind is from 3.2 cents to 7.7 cents; there is a wide variation and no indication that 3.6 cents is a weighted average. It seems to be a conveniently chosen number at the low end of the range.

However, Jacobson’s state and country plans do not limit themselves to onshore wind turbines; they include a substantial contribution from offshore installations. According to the chart on page 2 of Jacobson’s own source, the weighted average cost for that power source is 15.2 cents per kilowatt hour, more than 4 times the attractive number he used during the debate.

It’s also worth remembering that these clips of Jacobson’s statements and responses to questions came from a debate at UCLA, in Southern California. Though he limited his claim about the low cost of solar to utility scale installations, he must have known that his audience believes that solar is something that everyone should have on their rooftops and that those who do install it are doing their part to save our planet’s atmosphere from CO2 dumping as a result of burning somewhat less fossil fuel.

According to Lazard 9.0, rooftop residential solar systems have an unsubsidized cost range of 18.4 to 30.0 cents per kilowatt hour. Rooftop commercial systems have an unsubsidized cost range of 10.9 to 19.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Even community scale solar has a range of 7.8 to 13.6 cents per kilowatt hour.

In all cases of wind, water and solar resources, Lazard provides the following warnings on page 1:

Other factors would also have a potentially significant effect on the results contained herein, but have not been examined in the scope of thi current analysis. These additional factors, among others, could include: capacity value vs. energy value; stranded costs related to distributed generation or otherwise; network upgrade, transmission or congestion costs; integration costs; and costs of complying with various environmental regulations (e.g., carbon emissions offsets, emissions control systems). The analysis also does not address potential social and environmental externalities, including, for example, the social costs and rate consequences for those who cannot afford distribution generation solutions, as well as the long-term residual and societal consequences of various conventional generation technologies that are difficult to measure (e.g., nuclear waste disposal, environmental impacts, etc.)

He remembered the number printed for nuclear accurately, though the chart illustrates a range of values, it has a diamond at the 12.4 cents per kilowatt-hour number that he cited indicating that it represents the current levelized cost of the Votle project, which is the first AP1000 project anywhere in the US.

That cost estimate, by the way, includes the transmission upgrades that are a part of the complete project.

Aside: I’m not sure why Lazard did not include the V.C. Summer project in its calculation of the cost of nuclear energy; it’s on virtually the same development timeline and has nearly the same quality of publicly available cost information. It it, after all, a project being done under the close supervision of a public utility regulator that represents the customers’ interests. End Aside.

After listening closely to Jacobson and reading a number of blogs that are critical of his work, I’ve begun to suspect that he is being held up as the next Lovins by those who advocate for massive deployment of renewable energy. The true believers might want to look carefully for indications that might be being set up for a fall.

Jacobson’s plans are so weak and so heavily promoted or referenced that he makes a good strawman for those who want to discredit everyone that is concerned about global climate change.

Skeptics can create some really nasty and quite realistic scenarios of economic collapse if we follow Jacobson’s 100% WWS prescriptions. Those dire predictions might then be used to encourage the public to resist effective efforts to address the harm resulting from dumping 36 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

Additional Reading

Series of articles published in January 2016 by Jani-Petri Martikainen, a Finnish physicist with a strong interest in energy and the environment.

From Barry Brook’s Brave New Climate

November 2009 – Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030’

Articles from Charles Barton’s Nuclear Green

February 23, 2010 Mark Z. Jacobson is Credible as a Scientist?

October 31, 2009 The Jacobson-Delucchi plan revealed

The Real Cost of Wind Energy – This is a series of critiques and rebuttals of a commentary published in the August 24, 2001 issue of Science titled Exploiting Wind Versus Coal by Mark Z. Jacobson and Gilbert M. Masters.

(Note: One of Jacobson’s colleagues provided this link as an example of the way he staunchly defends his work against published critiques to the point where he wears down his critics.)