Renewables are just not serious

Our leaders just don't believe in them

A few months back, in my long article on who hates renewables, I noted that renewables were not seen as a serious solution because, amongst other things, nobody can take credit for them, as they are too dispersed and not controlled by a handful of people. I’d like to come back to that a bit.

Again: renewables are not seen as a serious solution:

• They are associated with extremists and unserious people. Renewables are still willfully tainted by their association with green movements, who are either clueless hippies or dangerous communists/totalitarian ideologies who want to take us back to the stone age. This may sound like a caricature at a time when greens are in government in places like Germany and are simultaneously accused of catering only to the need of their wealthy urban supporters and ignoring the needs of “real people”, but it’s very prevalent, and it’s leading to tribal behavior (whatever someone identified as “green” supports, I’ll push the opposite)

• They are tainted by greenwashing. All corporations these days claim to be green, when too many obviously still are not (or very superficially): their claims on switch to renewables (or sustainability) look puny and appear (rightfully) as just fig leafs - which in turn makes renewables look like something they do out of political correctness, because they have to in order to avoid public grief, and not because it actually works. (Politicians reconverting into greenwashing consultants do not help improve the perception that it’s just a useless gravy train for an out-of-touch elite)

• They are seen as unreliable. “What do you do when there’s no wind and sun” is a question that absolutely everybody understands and asks - and rightly so. But nobody asks “what happens in winter when nuclear plants are working at full capacity already and temperatures drop by another degree / demand increases” - which is just as legitimate a question, and a fundamentally similar one with exactly the same answer: flexible capacity will come online to supplement the “must-run” plants (baseload and weather-dependent renewables). Nobody seems to realize that when you have a lot of baseload, you need a lot of flexible capacity everyday, for many hours, to manage the daily peaks in demand above the baseload minimum. In other words: backup is something that the power system knows a lot about, because it needs it all the time, and providing it for renewables is not really more complicated than for our current system - it’s just a different profile to manage. It requires more MWs of backup, but fewer MWh, and since with flexible plants it’s the MWh that are expensive, not the MW, it’s not even more expensive overall). But the perception that you can’t run a system on flimsy unreliable renewables is hard to shake.

• People still believe they are costly. Between announcements of multi-trillion investment requirements (which are never compared to what would be invested anyway in the sector over such a long period), the lazy use of “subsidies” for long term fixed prices which are market-competitive, and the background assumption that the transition requires us to sacrifice our lifestyle, it’s no wonder. The industry does not help, with its endless whining for support - and for actual subsidies (but in that it’s not really different from the rest of the energy sector). That perpetuates the notion that building renewables is only done as a sacrifice to “save the planet” and not because it actually (also) makes sense on its own.

• Markets think they are not worth anything. Most renewable energy companies are still relatively small, compared to incumbents, and they do not loom large on the stock market, the only “real” sign of success and value creation. There was a revealing moment when the stock market value of Ørsted, the Danish energy company which is a leader in offshore wind, almost matched that of ExxonMobil in late 2020. Suddenly every stock market analyst became a specialist in offshore wind (the closest thing renewables have to Big Industry), and it sounded like a new time had come. But it did not last, and was quickly dismissed as a bubble - and ExxonMobil’s stock price was temporarily saved by Putin… Renewables are not as concentrated as the rest of the energy sector, and that makes them look small and weak and irrelevant.

  They get blamed for any problem because the energy sector is complex and easily misunderstood. People in power fundamentally do not believe in renewables, because they almost never talk to people who understand the sector. With a few honorable exceptions, they get whatever they know about the energy sector from their conversations with senior people in utilities and oil&gas companies, who are deeply conflicted about the topic, and from what they read in the business press, where renewables only appear superficially and make it to the front page when someone claims there is a problem:

  • Blaming (not-yet-built) offshore wind for killing whales in the NorthEast

  • Blaming wind for power system failures caused by frozen gas pipelines or transmission lines damaged by a storm

  • Breathless predictions about future shortages of various metals ,

  • As noted above, the industry itself whining about the subsidies it does not really need but would still like to receive…)

Essentially, renewables are seen as either a PR stunt (nice pictures, but irrelevant to “real” problems), a tribal marker (renewables go with woke, hippies, communism, eco-terrorists, etc.), or something that does not really work. So budgets, and policies, are conceived with renewables as an add-on, meant to be harmless, to the “real” stuff.

When Putin cut off the gas to Europe, politicians took action and decisions and LNG import terminals were built in a few months. Subsidies, real ones, to support continued fossil fuel consumption, were allocated in the tens of billions of euros. Grandiose plans for nuclear, that most serious of sectors, were made. In parallel, permitting rules for renewables were vaguely tweaked, but nothing really changed for the sector - notwithstanding the fact that French nuclear failures were a bigger problem than gas shortages for the European power sector in 2022 and renewables are actually saving the day.

So; for something important, decisions can be taken - and are taken.

Boosting renewables obviously does not rate as important.

In many countries, renewables deployment these days is happening despite the politicians, not thanks to them.

I still have the hope that at some point, politicians will realize that 40, 50, or even 80% of electricity comes from renewables, without blackouts; that renewables actually protect consumers from imported higher energy prices, that carbon emissions can go down, and that we are changing the system at record speed (maybe not fast enough, but still really fast).

I also see that there is a huge entrepreneurial wave into the energy transition - multiple initiatives, not just to build renewable energy, but to store energy and manage the grid better, find ways to control demand better, and electrify many sectors that use fossil fuels. A lot of that activity is still below the radar of most - small companies, local initiatives, but there’s many of them, and the successful ones are growing nicely.

Even if they attract media attention only when they become “unicorns”, they are already doing good work, and paving the way for our energy system (and not just the power system) to be transformed for the better. Once our politicians see the opportunities for photo ops, they may pay attention. In the meantime, it’s probably better to just get things done to transform the system, than participate to the rather depressing political debate about it.