by Mark Jacobson
This is a response to James
Conca's article in Forbes on June 26, "Debunking the
Unscientific Fantasy of 100% Renewables."
Conca's article describes a
paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
by Chris Clack and coauthors on June 19, criticizing
a paper colleagues and I authored in the same journal in 2015. Our original paper
showed that the U.S. can transition to 100% clean, renewable energy in all
energy sectors without coal, nuclear
power or biofuels. In this response, I show that Conca was negligent by not
reporting on our response in PNAS and by seriously misrepresenting
facts.
Conca's article starts with
two misrepresentations. First, Conca points to the Clack critique in PNAS but
nowhere does he mention that PNAS published our response to Clack equally and
simultaneously. In fact, PNAS gave us the last words by not allowing Clack to
respond to us. Our main conclusion, which PNAS published, was "The premise
and all error claims by Clack et al. about Jacobson et al. are demonstrably
false. We reaffirm Jacobson et al.'s conclusions." Conca did not report
this.
Second, Conca states in the
first sentence that "twenty-one prominent scientists issued a sharp
critique," but fails to point out that Clack and coauthors' own disclosure
published in their paper indicates that only three out of 21 coauthors
performed any type of research for the article. The remaining 18 did no
research whatsoever, merely contributing to writing the paper. Of the three
authors who did perform research, one has admitted publicly, "I am not an
energy expert" (see 15 minutes and 32 seconds into this UCLA
debate. In the meantime, our 100% clean, renewable energy peer-reviewed
papers have collectively had more than 85 researcher-coauthors and more than 35
anonymous peer reviewers.
Third, as pointed out in our
published response, there were zero mathematical modeling errors in our
underlying model as claimed by Clack. This clarifies an inaccurate quote Conca
attributes to me, "…there is not a single error in our paper." Not
only did Conca never interview me to obtain such a quote, but the misquote is
wrong on its face, since we acknowledge in our PNAS response (which Conca does
not cite) our failure to be clear in our paper about one particular assumption
and our neglect of one cost. However, while we were not clear in our original
paper, there was no underlying model error, contradicting Clack's major
contention in his paper.
Specifically, in one instance,
Clack falsely claimed we had a model error because he believed that a number in
a table of ours was a maximum value when, in fact, the text clearly indicated
that the number was an annual average number that varied in time, not a maximum
number. Nowhere in the text was the word "maximum" used to describe
that number. Thus, Clack made up out of thin air the claim that the number was
a maximum. Clack and all coauthors were informed their claim was an error
through a document sent to him by us through PNAS prior to publication of their
article but still refused to correct it. One must wonder what the motivation is
of authors who are informed of an error yet refuse to correct it.
Conca's article repeats
another one of Clack's false claims. Namely, the claim that our goal of using
100% clean, renewable energy will increase costs if we exclude nuclear power
and coal with carbon capture, stating that our doing so is "at complete
odds with serious analyses and assessments, including those performed by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the International
Energy Agency and most of academia."
However, as stated in our PNAS-published
response to Clack that Conca negligently fails to cite, the IPCC says the exact
opposite: "Without support from governments, investments in new nuclear
power plants are currently generally not economically attractive within
liberalized markets, ..." Further, unlike in our studies, neither the
IPCC, NOAA, NREL, nor the IEA has ever performed or reviewed a cost analysis of
grid stability with near 100% clean, renewable energy so could not possibly
have come to the conclusion claimed by Conca.
Conca, then makes a misleading
and irrelevant statement. He says that we "assume a nuclear war every 30
years or so." The PNAS study he is criticizing says nothing of the sort.
He fails to tell readers he is referring to a completely different paper that I
wrote from 2009 that estimated the upper-limit risk of nuclear war from nuclear
weapons proliferation. However, just like he negligently failed to report our
response published in PNAS, Conca failed to report the lower-limit risk of
nuclear war as stated in the 2009 paper, zero nuclear wars. Why would he report
only the upper-limit of a risk rather than both the upper and lower-limit
risks?
Conca then claims we assumed
15 million acres covered by wind and solar, which is wrong, but even if it were
correct, he doesn't realize this is only 0.66% of U.S. land area to replace all
fossil fuels. He forgets that the 1.7 million active and 2.3 million inactive
oil and gas wells alone in the U.S. plus the 20,000 new ones each year occupy
more than 1% of U.S. land area for the roads, well pads, and storage
facilities.
Conca then falsely claims we
proposed to add new hydroelectric installations equivalent to 600 Hoover dams
when our paper clearly calls for zero new dams. We propose only to increase the
hydropower maximum discharge rate by adding turbines without increasing the
annual hydropower energy output (thus no change in the annual amount of water
in any reservoir). The concept of adding turbines to the outside of existing
hydropower dams to increase the maximum discharge rate while keeping annual
hydropower energy constant was a new idea that works. The legitimate question
is, what is the maximum discharge rate that is practical relative to other
options by 2050, not whether it is possible to increase the discharge rate.
Regardless, an alternate
solution to increasing the hydropower discharge rate is to increase the
discharge rate of concentrated solar power (CSP) and/or adding batteries. Both
methods results in low-cost solutions as illustrated for the United States and
Canada here. These results contradict Clack's premise that our
nation's energy can't run 100% on wind, water and solar power alone at low
cost.
Conca further criticizes
underground storage in rocks, but it is inexpensive (less than 1/300th the cost
per unit energy stored than batteries) and a form of district heat. Sixty
percent of Denmark's heat is from district heating.
In sum, debate
about our energy future can be constructive and is certainly encouraged.
But inaccurate statements about scientific work and amplifications of those
inaccuracies help no one. Had Conca read our PNAS response at all, he would not
have made the errors he did. However, my colleagues and I are always seeking to
improve our methods and calculations. Our goals are to better the quality of
life of everyone by determining the best ways to provide clean, renewable, and
reliable energy while creating jobs and improving people's health and reducing
costs. Hopefully others share these goals, regardless of political party
affiliation.
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