Why renewables can’t save the planet | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxDanubia

Thank you very much

When I was a boy, My parents sometimes

would take me camping in California.

We would camp in the beaches,

in the forests, in the deserts.

some people think that deserts are

empty of life.

But my parents taught me to see

the wild life all around us,

The hawks, the eagles, the tortoises.

One time when we were staying up at camp,

We found a baby scorpion with its sting around,

And I remember thinking how cool it was

that something could be both so cute

and also so dangerous.

After college, I moved to California,

And I started working on a number of

environmental campaigns.

I got involved in hoping to save

the state's last ancient redwood forest.

And blocking a proposed radioactive waste

repository set for the desert.

And surely after I turned 30,

I decided that I wanted to dedicate

a significant amount of life to solving

climate change.

I was worried that global warming would

end up destroying many of the natural

environments that people had worked

so hard to protect.

I thought the technical solution were

pretty straight forward,

solar panels on every roof,

electric cars in the drive way,

that the main obstacles were political.

And so I hoped to organize a coalition

of the countries biggest labor unions

and biggest environmental groups.

Our proposal was for a 300 billion dollar

in renewables.

And the idea was not only we would prevent

climate change but, we would also create

millions of new jobs in a very fast

growing high tech sector.

Our efforts really paid off in 2007,

when then presidential candidate

Barack Obama embraced our vision.

And between 2009 and 2015,

the US invested a 150 billion dollars

in renewables and other kinds of clean tac.

But right away, we started to encounter

some problems.

So first of all, the electricity from

solar roof tops in some costs about twice

as much as the electricity from solar farms.

And both solar farms and wind farms

require a cover of pretty significant

amount of land with

solar panels and wind turbines,

And also building very big transmission lines

to bring all that electricity from the

country side into the city.

Both of those things were often very

strongly resisted by local communities,

as well as by conservation biologists who

were concerned about the impacts on

wild birds species and other animals.

Now, there was a lot of other people

working on technical solutions at the time

One of the big challenges of course is

just the intermediacy of solar and wind.

They only generate electricity about

10 - 30 % of the time during most of the year

But, Some of the solutions that were

being proposed were to convert hydroelectric

dams into gigantic batteries.

The idea was that when the sun was shining

and the wind was blowing, you would pump

the water uphill, stored for later and

then when you needed electricity you run

it over the turbines.

In terms of wild life, some of these

problems just didn't seem like

a significant concern.

So, when I learned that house cats

killed billions of birds every year.

it put into perspective that hundreds of

thousands of birds that are rather killed

by wind turbines.

Basically seemed to me at the time that

most if not all of the problems of

scaling up solar and wind could be solved

through more technological innovation.

But as the years went by, these problems

persisted, and in many cases grew worse.

So, California is a state that is really

committed to renewable energy.

But we still haven't converted many of our

hydroelectric dams into big batteries.

Some of the problems are just geographic,

It is just, you have to have a very

particular kind of formation to build

and do that.

And even in those cases, it's quite

expensive to make those conversions.

Other challenges are just that, there is

other uses for water like irrigation,

And maybe this is the most significant

problem is just that, In California,

The water in our rivers and reservoirs

is growing increasingly scarce and

unreliable due to climate change.

In term of the situation of reliability,

As a consequence of it, we have actually

had to stop the electricity coming from

the solar farms into the cities because

there are just have been too much of it

at times, or, We have been starting to

pay out neighboring states as Arizona to

take that solar electricity, The

alternative is to suffer from blowouts of

the grid.

And in turns out that,

when it comes to birds and cats,

Cats don't kill eagles, Eagles kill cats.

What cats kill are the small common

sparrows and jays and robins,

Birds that are not endangered and not at

risk of going to extinct.

What do kill eagles and another big birds

like the skite, as well as owls, and condors.

And other threatened endangered species

are wind turbines.

In fact, they are one of the most

significant threats to those big birds

species that we have.

We just haven't been introducing the air

space with many other objects like we have

wind turbines over the last several years.

And in terms of solar, you know,

building a solar farm is not like building

any other kind of farm, you have to clear

the whole area of wild life.

so, this is a picture of one third of

one of the biggest solar farms in

California called ivanpah.

In order to build this, they had to clear

the whole area of desert tortoises.

literally, pulling desert tortoises and

their babies out of borrows,

putting them on the back of pickup trucks

and transporting them to captivity where

many of them ended up dying.

And currently, the current estimates are

that about 6 thousand birds are

killed every year.

Actually, catching on fire above the

solar farms and bulging to their death.

Over time, it gradually struck me that,

there was really no amount of technological

innovation that was gonna make the sun

shine more regularly or wind blow more

reliably.

In fact, you could make solar panel

cheaper, you can make wind turbines bigger

But, sunlight and wind are just really

dilute fuels, and in order to produce

significant amount of electricity,

you just have to cover a very large land

mass with them.

In other words, all of the major problems

with renewables aren't technical,

They are natural.

Well, dealing with all of this unreliability

and the big environmental impacts obviously

comes that a pretty high economic cost.

You know, we have been hearing a lot

about how solar panels and wind turbines

have come down in cost in recent years.

But that cost has been significantly

out wade by just the challenges of