The top wind and solar developers plan to build a collective 92,105 MW of capacity in the U.S. through 2026.
That’s terrific. But some perspective is helpful.
According to the Energy Information Administration:
At the end of 2021, the United States had 1,143,757 MW—or about 1.14 billion kW—of total utility-scale electricity generating capacity.
Of that, 43 percent is currently generated by natural gas, 18 percent is generated by coal, and 8 percent is by nuclear. All renewables combined account for 27 percent of electricity-generation capacity, with 9 percent hydroelectric and 16 percent non-hydroelectric.
That means if all 92,105 MW of new renewable construction through 2026 goes to replacing existing nonrenewable forms of utility-scale electricity-generation capacity, renewable’s share will increase from 27 percent to 35 percent.
That’s not a lot, but it’s not too bad, either. If renewables’ share of current capacity can increase by eight percentage points every five years starting now, it would reach 100 percent renewable by 2067.
The environmentalists say that’s too long, and we need 100 percent by 2050 or sooner. The 2050 goal could be doable, however, if the pace of construction were to pick up.
But remember, I’ve only calculated what it would take to replace existing generation capacity. There will be more people in the future, so we’ll need more electricity. Census Bureau projections go out only to 2060, but they say the U.S. will have 404.4 million people by then. At current rates of electricity-generation capacity per capita, the U.S. would need 1,401,622 MW of capacity by 2060, a 23 percent increase over 2021. And all of the 23 percent increase would need to be from renewables because that’s all we’re building.
But remember, each person in the future will be using more electricity as well. Environmentalists want everything that’s currently powered by other energy sources to go electric. That means electric cars and trucks, electric stoves, electric heaters, etc. Let’s say for sake of argument that electricity-generation capacity per capita would need to increase by 20 percent (which is probably a conservative estimate) by 2060 to accommodate these changes. That puts us up to 1,681,947 MW needed by 2060, which would be a 47 percent increase over 2021.
U.S. renewable electricity-generation capacity is currently 308,814 MW. To get to 1,681,947 MW by 2060, we’d need to build 180,675 MW every five years, or roughly double what we are actually projected to build over the next five years.
The environmentalist could look at that and say, “See, that’s why we need more funding for renewable construction.”
But remember, wind and solar suffer from intermittency problems, which means we’d need backup sources of electricity for cloudy and calm days. And those backup sources would need to be pretty large, even if they wouldn’t be used all the time, because they may need to supply power to entire cities, depending on how bad the intermittency issue is at a given moment.
But remember, we’d need to put these new wind and solar farms somewhere, and presumably many of them would be in places that do not currently have energy infrastructure to transmit power to the grid. Transmission-line projects would need to be built in many remote areas, especially in the Great Plains and the deserts in the West, which are currently sparsely populated. So countless people would need to move to work on these projects.
But remember, you can’t just run around building stuff in the United States of America; you have to jump through the hoops the bureaucracy has set for you, which can take years. Countless lawyers and consultants are going to be needed for environmental-review filings, lawsuits from landowners and activist groups, and construction-regulation compliance.
But remember, you need to buy the raw materials, some of which are very expensive, to build all these new wind and solar farms. And nearly doubling demand from the world’s largest economy will add even more price pressure.
Instead of viewing the “energy transition” as one giant project to be completed, it would be much more helpful to view it as a trend that’s occurring independently and gradually. The U.S. is simply not going to be 100 percent renewable any time soon. It would be unbelievably expensive and require a wholesale restructuring of American society. Some of its more radical proponents see that as a positive, but the vast majority of people do not.
Back in March, Jonathan Lesser of the Manhattan Institute looked at some of the other renewable-energy numbers for Capital Matters, and the math isn’t any prettier. Whether 100 percent renewable energy is desirable has to take a back seat to whether it’s realistic.