IEEE Spectrum July, 2012 - 48

History and a consideration of the
technical requirements show that the
problem is much greater than these
advocates have supposed.
What Was the German Government

thinking in 2004, when it offered a subsidy, known as a feed-in tariff, that guaranteed investors as much as €0.57 per
kilowatt-hour for the next two decades
of photovoltaic generation? At the time,
the average price for electricity from
other sources was about €0.20/kWh; by
comparison, the average U.S. electricity price in 2004 was 7.6 cents, or about
€0.06/kWh. With subsidies like that, it
was no wonder that Bavaria Solarpark
was just the beginning of a rush to build
photovoltaic plants in Germany. By the
end of 2011, Germany's PV installations
had a capacity of nearly 25 gigawatts,
which was more than a third of the
global total. If you subsidize something
enough, at first it can seem almost reasonable; only later does reality intervene.
This past March, stung by the news that
Germans were paying the second highest
electricity rates in Europe, the German
parliament voted to cut the various solar
subsidies by up to 29 percent.
Such generous subsidies are by no
means a German peculiarity. They
have been the norm in the new world of
renewable energies; only their targets
differ. Spain also subsidized wind and
PV generation before cutting its feedin tariff for large installations by nearly
50 percent in 2010. China's benefits to its
wind-turbine makers were so generous
that the United States complained about
them to the World Trade Organization in
December 2010. In the United States the
greatest beneficiary so far has been neither solar nor wind but biomass-specifically, corn used to produce ethanol.
According to the U.S. Government
Accountability Office, the excise tax
credit for ethanol production cost tax-

payers US $6.1 billion in 2011. On top of
that direct cost are three indirect ones:
those related to soil erosion, the runoff
of excess nitrate from fertilizers (which
ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it
creates dead zones in coastal waters),
and the increased food costs that accrue
when the world's largest exporter of
grain diverts 40 percent of its corn to
make ethanol. And topping all those
off, the resulting fuel is used mostly in
energy-inefficient vehicles.

ou miGht arGue that sub-

sidies aren't bad in themselves; indeed, there is a
long history of using them
to encourage new energy
sources. The oil and gas industries
have benefited from decades of tax relief
designed to stimulate exploration. The
nuclear industry has grown on the back
of direct and enormous R&D support.
In the United States it received almost
54 percent of all federal research funds
between 1948 and 2007. In France it got
the all-out support of the state electricitygenerating company. Without that subsidy, the industry would never have
managed to get its recent share of more
than 75 percent of the French electricity
market. We must therefore ask whether
the subsidies for alternative energy can
deliver what their promoters promise.
Make no mistake-they promise
much. The most ardent supporters of
solar, wind, and biomass argue that
these sources can replace fossil fuels and
create highly reliable, nonpolluting, carbon-free systems priced no higher than
today's cheapest coal-fired electricity
generation, all in just a few decades. That
would be soon enough to prevent the rise
of atmospheric carbon dioxide from its
current level of 394 parts per million to
more than 450 ppm-at which point, climatologists estimate, the average global

data source: VaclaV smil

Without these subsidies, renewable
energy plants other than hydroelectric
and geothermal ones can't yet compete
with conventional generators. There are
several reasons, starting with relatively
low capacity factors-the most electricity a plant can actually produce divided
by what it would produce if it could be
run full time. The capacity factor of a
typical nuclear power plant is more
than 90 percent; for a coal-fired generating plant it's about 65 to 70 percent. A
photovoltaic installation can get close to
20 percent-in sunny Spain-and a wind
turbine, well placed on dry land, from
25 to 30 percent. Put it offshore and it
may even reach 40 percent. To convert
to either of the latter two technologies,
you must also figure in the need to string
entirely new transmission lines to places
where sun and wind abound, as well as
the need to manage a more variable system load, due to the intermittent nature
of the power.
All of these complications are well
known, and all of them have been too
lightly dismissed by alternative energy
backers and the media. Most egregious
of all is the boosters' failure to recognize
the time it takes to convert to any new
source of energy, no matter how compelling the arguments for it may be.
An example is the 2008 plan promoted by former vice president Al Gore,
which called for replacing all fossilfueled generation in the United States in
just a decade. Another is Google's plan,
announced in 2008 and abandoned in
2011, which envisaged cutting out coal
generation by 2030. Trumping them all
was a 2009 article in Scientific American
by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil
engineering at Stanford University, and
Mark Delucchi, a researcher in transportation studies at the University of
California, Davis. They proposed converting the energy economy of the entire
world to renewable sources by 2030.

Energy Sources: They Grow Up So...Slowly
An energy technology takes a lifetime to mature. In the United States, for instance, it took coal
103 years to account for just 5 percent of the total energy consumed and an additional 26 years
to reach 25 percent. Succeeding technologies hit the first benchmark sooner but the second
one as late or even later: In the United States, nuclear power still hasn't gotten there.
years to supply 5%
of all primary energy
years to supply 25%
of the market share
after reaching 5%
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2012