Net-Zero Requires Trillions Of Dollars And Much Lower Living Standards

Imagine the USA in 2050 has a net-zero emissions economy, as President Joe Biden has pledged that it will (the UK is also committed to this). Three very large, interrelated, and multidisciplinary engineering projects will need to have been completed. Transport will have been electrified. Industrial and domestic heat will have been electrified.

The electricity sector – generation, transmission, and distribution – will have been greatly expanded in order to cope with the first two projects, and will have ceased to use ‘fossil fuels’.

I have had a long career in industrial and academic engineering and recently retired as a professor of technology in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. I’ve spent some time looking into the feasibility of these ideas, and these are the facts.

At the moment the USA uses an average of 7,768 trillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy every month, most of which is supplied by burning ‘fossil fuels’ either directly for heat or transport, or indirectly to generate electricity.

Because an internal combustion engine converts the energy stored in its fuel into transport motion with an efficiency of about 30 percent, while electric motors are more than 90 percent efficient at using energy stored in a battery, we will need to increase the US electricity supply by about 25 percent to maintain transport in the USA at today’s level.

Let’s assume that replacing today’s ‘fossil’-powered vehicles and trains with electric ones will cost no more than we would have spent replacing them anyway: it’s not really true but the difference is small compared to the rest of this.

I should note however that a small part of today’s transport energy is used for aviation and shipping, which are much harder to electrify than ground transport, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Next, we need to electrify all the heat. If this heat was provided by ordinary electric heaters, we would need an extra electrical sector equal to the size of today’s.

But if we mostly use air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and assume a coefficient of performance of 3:1 – optimistic, but not wildly unreasonable – then we only need new grid capacity equivalent to 35 percent of the size of the present grid for the heating task.

So far, the grid in 2050 will need to be more than 60 percent bigger than its present size.

We also need to work on the buildings. U.S. building stock is made up of nearly 150 million housing units, and commercial and industrial buildings, with an estimated floor space of 367 billion square feet. Some of this is well insulated, but much of it is not.

All of it would need to be for our heat pumps to work at the efficiencies we need them to. Based on a UK pilot retrofit program, the national scale cost for this is $1 trillion per 15 million population. The figure in the USA could therefore be about $20 trillion. It might be as high as $35 trillion.

We should note here that as with transport, some specialist types of heating cannot at the moment be done electrically, for instance in primary steel production.

These will involve extra costs if net zero is to be reached, but we’ll ignore that for now, even though we’re going to need an awful lot of steel.

Now let’s get the power grid decarbonized and make it 60 percent bigger and more powerful. Taken together, the US electrical grid has been called the largest machine in the world: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution ones.

We will need to add a further 120,000 miles of transmission line. This will cost on the order of $0.6 trillion, based on US cost data.

The 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines will have to be upgraded to carry much higher currents.

Most houses in the USA have a main circuit-breaker panel that allows between 100 and 200 amps current into the house, although some new ones are rated at 300A.

The 100A standard was set nearly a century ago when the electric kettle was the largest single appliance.

In a modern all-electric home, some of the new appliances draw rather higher currents: ground-source heat pumps may draw 85A on start-up, radiant hobs when starting up draw 37A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 46A, and even slow ones may draw 17A, while electric showers draw 46A.

The local wiring in streets and local transformers were all sized to the 100A limit. Most homes will need an upgraded circuit breaker panel and at least some rewiring, and much local wiring and many local substations will need upsizing.

The UK costs have been estimated in detail at £1 trillion, which would scale to the order of $6 trillion on a per-capita basis.

As 60 percent of the current electrical generation is ‘fossil’-fueled, we need to close all the ‘fossil’ stations down and increase the remaining, non-‘fossil’ generation capacity four times over.

There isn’t much scope for new hydropower, and so far ‘carbon’ capture doesn’t exist outside ‘fossil fuel’ production.

Using a mixture of wind (onshore $1600/kW, offshore $6500/kW), solar ($1000/kW at the utility level), and nuclear ($6000/kW), the capital cost of this task alone is around $5 trillion, and we have not dealt with the enormous problem of wind and solar being intermittent.

So far we’re up to $32 trillion as the cost of providing insulated buildings and the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity in a net-zero world.

Although not all borne by households, this figure is of the order of $260,000 per US household.

Straight away, we can see that a net-zero grid with a large proportion of renewables simply cannot be built. But for now, let’s just ignore the storage problem and look at some more numbers.

So the real cost of net zero, or more likely of trying and failing to achieve it, would be similar to – or even more than – total projected US government spending out to 2050.

There is no likelihood of that amount of money being diverted from other purposes under anything resembling normal market economics and standards of living.

The idea that net zero can be achieved on the current timelines by any means short of a command economy combined with a drastic decline in standards of living – and several unlikely technological miracles – is a blatant falsehood.

The silence of the National Academies and the professional science and engineering bodies about these big-picture engineering realities is despicable.

Author: Michael Kelly

 

yogaesoteric
November 19, 2023