Burning more fossil fuels to enable renewable energy

The opening paragraph in a recent EnergyNow article on energy export from Canada's east coast was interesting:

Providing clean hydrogen to Germany and the rest of Europe is a better opportunity for Canada than trying to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals as the world moves away from fossil fuels, said Canada’s natural resources minister late on Thursday.

"As the world moves away from fossil fuels"?

Germany is dealing with their current energy issues by importing more liquefied natural gas and burning more coal. They are EU leaders in renewable energy but their renewable footprint does not deliver consistently year-round and its benefit is concentrated in the summer months. They will extend the life of nuclear plants that are currently running but will not restart those that have been retired. They make much of their renewable "biomass" generation, but it's largely fed by clear-cutting forests in the US with fossil fuels, turning the wood into pellets with fossil fuels, and shipping it across the ocean using fossil fuels. EU carbon accounting tricks do not require them to record the carbon created when supplying the fuel.

France is heavily-nuclear but is having issues with corrosion and with the water temperature of some of the rivers that feed their plants. The water has become too warm for some of the plants to function and after the reactor is done with it, it exits at a temperature harmful to aquatic life.

In Ontario, Canada, the government has confirmed that its Pickering nuclear plant will be shut down in a few years and will be replaced with natural gas generation. They are refurbishing other plants, to their credit.

Is the world really moving away from fossil fuels?

Nuclear is the only practical option that gets us off fossil fuels. Renewables do not have the reliability and consistency required to run a stable grid. Battery installations can smooth the supply curve, but there aren't enough resources in the world to build batteries that would be required to store large renewable surpluses to match supply and demand over a longer timescale of days.

And, besides, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines are made using metals harvested using fossil fuels and by processes that run on fossil fuels. This can be a net benefit, however, if used judiciously - we must get more energy back than we invest and must be careful not to induce demand with "guilt-free" renewable energy. All renewable energy requires fossil fuel inputs, ultimately.

Renewable energy might be cheap to produce when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, but it's not cheap when you attach a cost to supply stability and reliability, which any electrical system has to do if you value having electricity when you need it and not only when it is available. The grid also needs to become more sophisticated to accommodate the inconsistent supply.

If renewables were a great business - if it was really a matter of just capturing free sun and wind and selling it on to people for a price like Nestle bottles up spring water - businesses would be in it without hesitation rather than needing to be subsidized or ESG'd into it.

But what is the western world doing about nuclear? Very little. 

Some US states and Canadian provinces are doing trials with small, modular nuclear reactors. Maybe that will lead to something. But nuclear planning generally takes decades, and we seem to be planning more decommissions than new builds at this point.

But what about China? China has the largest manufacturing base for renewable infrastructure but they are planning or building scores of nuclear reactors. Why would they be doing that if renewables were such a sure thing? They are doing it because they do not have secure supplies of fossil fuels in the quantities needed to supply their massive population; they don't yet have the capacity to go and invade oil-rich countries to take their oil and protect the new supply chain back to China; because using coal is finite and dirty; and because once you have decided to choose electricity over fossil fuels, nuclear is a big part of the answer to clean electricity.

What does our position seem to be in Ontario Canada? That we will increase our use of renewables - optimistically to the extent that we can replace a nuclear plant here or there - and plug the hole with dynamic natural gas generation. If the renewables don't materialize, we'll just be burning more and more natural gas. Thankfully we have that option, but are we really "moving away from fossil fuels"? It sounds more like we want to ensure that we have enough to burn for ourselves within a fixed carbon footprint that we have imposed on ourselves.

Thoughts on Russia / Ukraine

 I know very little about this conflict and I'm not about to start posting pithy declarations about what must be true. If you want that, go to Twitter!

But, there seems to be a clear communications exercise in play that, despite very little concrete information about what is going on on the ground, paints the Russian invasion as an abject failure. The contrarian side of my mind doesn't like a wholly one-sided story.

The media coverage of this situation is confusing. Long periods of time go by without any real news for such an allegedly active conflict, and much of it is devoid of context. There's a lack of significant photography - significant because the worst possible photos are quick to make it to the fore when they are available - and some of it is said to be fake,  misinterpreted, or from prior conflicts. It's almost as if there is no meaningful long-term foreign media presence (or interest) in the country.

So, there are some of the factors that interest the contrarian side of my mind:

1. If you don't know what Putin's goals are (as almost everyone says that they do not), how can you say that he has failed?
1. He has not yet invested serious firepower in the conflict.
2. It was always and still is unreasonable to expect that an army of 150K people would invade and occupy/hold a country as large as Ukraine - especially inclusive of multiple, large urban centres. That's why nobody expected it to be done.
3. What if this is a "mowing the grass" exercise? Or one with explicit targets that are not easily understood or not tasty enough to report on?
4. The idea that Putin "would not have realized" how hostile some parts of Ukraine were to Russian involvement and misjudged the effect of this on their ability to advance seems laughable. I knew about this hostility and I know hardly anything about Ukraine. The whole premise for the invasion (faulty or not) was on hostility toward pro-Russian areas of the country.
5. Extend #4 to the idea that the difficulty of taking urban areas was misjudged. Russia has been active in Syria for years, and Syria is a very urban country.
2. Russia's government debt as a % of GDP is under 20%. Impressive.
3. China now knows what to expect if they have designs on Taiwan. Most Western hands have now been played, and have been shown that they can be cohesive in a hurry. Sanctions on China would more directly affect US prosperity and would presumably therefore be less severe (though military involvement may be on the table there, whereas it is not here). The sanctions against Russia presumably expose the worst case.
4. Canada has cut off Putin's funding. He must be as dangerous as those protestors that occupied Ottawa a few weeks ago. It puts it into perspective how extreme that "go after their money" aspect of the move against the protestors really was.
5. Hopefully Russia doesn't have technological backdoors into US or European infrastructure. This is the time you hold those types of things in reserve for.
6. Russian gas supply to Europe. It'd be a shame if something was to happen to that. I'm sure it'd be an accident if it did.
7. Unlike Donald Trump, Putin has not yet violated Twitter's terms of service and the Russian presidential account is still active.

I generally believe that, if you are dealing with smart people and something doesn't make sense to you, then it's because you don't understand their perspective or don't have the same aims or value system. That is to say, what they are doing makes sense only when you figure out how to look at it properly.

And on top of that, I say all of this recognizing that autocratic rule as exists in Russia is of a very different nature to democratic rule. The power dynamics are different; the personal costs and risks of failure to the leader are different. I recognize it, but I don't understand it. I can barely identify the real motives of democratic governments most of the time!