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 waid by just the challenges of

immigrating all of that unreliable power

on to the grid.

Just take fringe since what happened

in California.

At the period in which solar panels have

come down in price very significantly

and same with the wind.

We have seen our electricity crisis go up

5 times more than the rest of the country

and it is not unique to us.

You can see the same phenomenon

happen in Germany.

Which is really the world's leader in

solar, wind and other renewable technologies

their price has increased 50 percent

during their big renewable energy push.

Now,You might think.. well

dealing with climate changes just gonna

require that we all pay more for energy,

That's what I used to think.

But, consider the case of France,

France actually gets twice as much if its

electricity from clean zero emissions

sources than does Germany.

And yet, France pays half as much..

almost half as much for its electricity.

How can that be?

We might have already anticipated the

answer, France gets most of its electricity

from nuclear power, That's 75 percent

in total, and nuclear just ends up being

a lot more reliable, generating power,

24 hours a day, 7 days a week,

for about 90% of the year.

We see this phenomenon

show up at global level.

So, for example, there has been a natural

experiment over the last 40 years,

or even more than that.

And in terms of the deployment of nuclear

and the deployment of solar,

You can see that, at a little bit higher

cost, we got about half as much electricity

from solar and wind than we

did from nuclear.

Well, What does all this

mean for going forward.

I think one of the most significant

findings today is this one.

Had Germany spend 580 billion dollars

on nuclear instead of renewables?

It would already be getting a 100% of its

electricity from clean energy sources and

all of its transportation energy.

Now I think, you might be wondering and

it is quite reasonable to ask,

Is nuclear power safe?

And what do you do with the waste?

Well those are very reasonable questions,

Turns out that there has been scientific

studies of this going for over 40 years.

This is just the most recent study that

was done by the prestigious british

medical journal and says find the nuclear

power is the safest.

It is easy to understand why, according

to the world's health organization,

About 7 million people die annually

from air pollution and nuclear

plants don't emit that.

As a result, the climate scientist

James Hansen looked out and he calculated

that nuclear power has already saved

almost 2 million lives today.

Turns out that even wind energy is

more deadly than nucleur.

This is a photograph taken of two

workers in the Netherlands.

shortly before one of them fell to

his death to avoid the fire.

And the other one was engulfed in flames.

Now, what about environmental inmpact?

Well, I think a really easy way to think

about it is that uranium fuel which is

what we use to power nuclear plants

is just really energy dense.

About the same amount of uranium as this

Rubik's cube can power all of the energy

that you need in your entire life.

As a consequence, you just don't need that

much land in order to produce the

significant amount of electricity.

Here we can compare the solar farm I just

described ivanpah to California's last

nuclear plant diablo canyon.

It takes 450 times more land to generate

the same amount of electricity as

it does from nuclear.

You would need 17 more solar farms like

ivanpah in order to generate the same

output as diablo canyon and of course,

it would then be unreliable.

Well, what about the mining and the waste

and the materials that you put?

Well, this has been studied pretty closely

as well and it just turns out that

solar requires 17 times more materials

than nuclear plants do.

In the form of cement, glass, concrete,

steel and that includes all the fuel used

for those nuclear plants.

The consequences that what comes out at

the end, since that materials through put

is just not a lot of waste from nuclear.

All of the waste from the Swiss nuclear

program fits into this room.

Nuclear waste is actually the only waste

from electricity production that safely

contained and internalized.

Every other way of making electricity emits

the waste into the natural environment

either as pollution or as material waste.

We tend to think of solar panels as clean,

but the truth is that there is no plan to

deal with solar panels at the end of their

20 or 25 year life.

A lot of experts are very concerned that

solar panels are just gonna be shipped to

Poor countries in Africa or Asia with the

rest of our electronic wastes frame to be

disassembled often exposing people to

really high levels of toxic elements

including lead, cadmium and chromium.

Elements that...

Because these elements their toxicity

never declines over time.

I think we have an intuitive sense nuclear

is a really powerful strong energy source

and that sunlight is really dilute and

diffuse and weak which is why you have to

spread solar collectors and wind collectors

over such a large amount of land.

Maybe that's why nobody was surprised when

in the recent science fiction remake of

blade runner, the film opens a very dark

dystopian scene where California deserts

have been entirely paved with solar farms.

All of which I think raises a really

uncomfortable question.

In the effort to try to save the climate,

are we destroying the environment?

Well, the interesting thing is that over

the last several hundred years, human

beings been actually trying to move away

from what you considered matter- dense fuels

towards energy- dense ones.

That means really from wood towards coal,

oil, natural gas and uranium.

This is a phenomenon that has been going

on for a long time.

poor countries around the world are in the

process and still are moving away from wood

as their primary energies.

And for the most part, this is a positive thing

as you stop using wood as your major

source of fuel.

It allows the forest to grow back, and

the wild life to return.

As you stop burning wood in your home,

you no longer need to breathe that toxic smoke

And as you go from coal to natural gas

and uranium as your main sources of energy

it holds up the possibility of basically

eliminating air pollution all together.

There is just this problem with nuclear it

has been very popular to move from dirtier

to cleaner energy sources from energy

diffuse to energy dense sources.

Nuclear is just really unpopular for a

bunch of historical reasons.

and as a consequence, in the past I

and I think of a lot of others have sort

of said well, in order to deal with

climate change, we are just gonna need

all of the different kinds of clean energy

that we have.

the problem is that is just turns out not

to be true, you remember I discussed

France a little bit ago, France gets most

of its electricity from nuclear.

if France were to try the significantly

scale of solar and wind, it would also

have to significantly reduce how much

electricity it gets from nuclear.

that's because an order to handle the huge

very ability of solar and wind on the grid

they would need to burn more natural gas.

think of it this way, it is just really

hard to ramp up and down a nuclear plant

they were all pretty familiar with turning

the natural gas up and down on our stove

a similar process works in managing the

grid. of course, cause without saying that

oil and gas companies understand this

pretty well which is why we have seen them

invest millions of dollars in recent years

in promoting solar and wind.

this just praises another challenging

question which is that in places that are

using a lot of nuclear have grids that

are mostly nuclear hydro going towards

solar and wind and other renewables

would actually increase carbon emissions.

I think a better alternative is

just to tell the truth.

and that's what a number of scientists

have been doing, I mentioned earlier that

hundreds of thousands of birds are

killed every year by wind turbines.

but, I didn't mention is that a million

bats at a minimum are killed every

year by wind.

the consequences been bed that scientists

been speaking about this.

this particular bat species, the hoary bat

which is a migratory bat species is

literally at risk of going to extinct

right now because of the significant

expansion of wind.

it is not just wind, it's also on solar.

the scientists who are involved in creating

the ivanpah solar farm who involved in

clearing out land haven't spoken out.

one of them wrote:

"everybody know that translocation (of

desert tortoises) doesn't work.

when you are walking in front of a

bulldozer, crying, and moving animals and

cacti out of the way, it's hard to think

that the project is a good idea."

and now we can see these phenomena at work

at an international level.

my home city California, we have been

stuffing a lot of natural gas in to the

side of a mountain in order to handle

all that emitted from solar and wind

it sprung a leak, it was equivalent to

putting 500 thousand cars on the road.

and currently in Germany those protesters

trying to block a new coal mining project

that would involve destroying the ancient

humpback forest in order to get to the

coal underneath, all in effort to phase out

nuclear and expand solar and wind.

the good news is that, I think that people

still care about nature enough for these

facts to matter, we saw last year in south

Korea, a citizen is juried deliberated for

several month waying these different issues

they hadn't decided whether they were

gonna phase out a nuclear or keep it in an

expanded, they started out in 40% in favor

of expanding nuclear, but after several

months of considering these issues,

they ended up voting 60% to expand nuclear

a similar phenomena just happened last week

in Arizona, the voters had a valid initiative

that to vote on whether not to continue

with nuclear or phase it out and try to

replace it with natural gas and solar,

they ended up rejecting 70 to 30.

and even here in Europe, we saw the

Netherlands is one of the first countries

in recent memory to actually announce

as they did last week, that they are

gonna start o incre