Tucker 1 Lovins 0

Those who have been following the “alternative energy” fantasists for a while will recognize the name of Amory Lovins, the so-called “sage” (yet another pseudo-religious title utilized by liberal environmentalists for their heroes) of the Rocky Mountain Institute. They will also remember that he regularly advances marvelous-sounding schemes for re-imagining America’s energy mix, which never seem to go anywhere. He’s at it again, this time on the popular Freaknomics blog, where he suggests that renewable “micropower” is the future of energy:

Power plants also got irrationally big, upwards of a million kilowatts. Buildings use about 70 percent of U.S. electricity, but three-fourths of residential and commercial customers use no more than 1.5 and 12 average kilowatts respectively. Resources better matched to the kilowatt scale of most customers’ needs, or to the tens-of-thousands-of-kilowatts scale of typical distribution substations, or to an intermediate “microgrid” scale, actually offer 207 hidden economic advantages over the giant plants. These “distributed benefits” often boost economic value by about tenfold. The biggest come from financial economics: for example, small, fast, modular units are less risky to build than big, slow, lumpy ones, and renewable energy sources avoid the risks of volatile fuel prices. Moreover, a diversified portfolio of many small, distributed units can be more reliable than a few big units. Bigger power plants’ hoped-for economies of scale were overwhelmed by diseconomies of scale.

Thankfully, William Tucker, author of the excellent new book Terrestrial Energy, has responded in the comments section. His comment is worth reproducing in full:

Quite briefly, Lovins is drawing a false analogy between the miniaturization and distribution of computing and telecom instruments and the production of energy. Computers and telephones can be miniaturized and distributed according to Moore’s Law because they involve information. You can use less and less energy to store each bit. For that reason you can have as much computing power on your desktop today as Univac had in an entire room in the 1960s. Computers can be distributed because they have become so powerful.

But things don’t work that way with energy. A kilowatt is a kilowatt, whether it’s generated in your backyard or at a power station. You can “distribute” generation anywhere you want but you still have use the same amount of fuel or wind or whatever. We could replace central thermal stations with gas turbines on every street corner, but the fuel is going to be expensive and produce a lot more carbon emissions, which is something Lovins conveniently overlooks.

The real irony, however, is his suggestion that wind fits this small-is-beautiful scenario. Sure wind is “distributed.” After all, you need 125 square miles of 45-story windmills to generate the same 1000 megawatts that can be generated in one square mile at a central thermal station. You’ve got to put them somewhere! And that’s just their nameplate capacity. To produce 1000 MW of base load electricity, you’d need at least three or four 125-square-mile wind farms scattered at diverse locations around the country.

That’s the reason Lovins himself has suggested covering all of North and South Dakota with wind farms. Al Gore matches him by asking for 1/5 of New Mexico, the fifth largest state, for solar collectors. On top of this, they want to rebuild the entire national grid to 765 kilovolts in order to ferry all this electricity from the remote areas where it’s best generated to population centers. And Lovins calls 1000-MW power plants operating on the current transmission system “irrationally big!”

What Lovins never wants to acknowledge is the energy density of nuclear power. With nuclear, the energy produced from 500 square miles of windmills can be generated with a fuel assembly that would fit in the average living room. Why “distribute” all this generating capacity into big, ugly structures that litter the landscape and only work when the wind blows? Why not concentrate it all in one place? Then once every 18 months a single tractor-trailer can come in with a new set of fuel rods.

In one respect, though, Lovins may be right. Maybe we shouldn’t be building nuclear reactors to 1500 MW. Hyperion, a New Mexico company, has invented an 80-MW mini-reactor the size of a gazebo that can power a town of 20,000. You could put it in someone’s basement and no one would ever notice. While “alternate energy” has gotten more and more gigantic, nuclear is getting smaller and smaller.

Who would have thought it would be nuclear that is small and beautiful?

Indeed. As Mr Tucker explains at greater length in his book, the real problem with “renewable” energy is that it is just so distribute and dispersed that collecting in the quantity and quality we need it is a real problem, one that size alone can solve. Lovins’ argument is just about the reverse of reality.