The "New Energy Economy": An Exercise in Magical Thinking | Manhattan Institute

He is also coauthor of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005). [...] This “new energy economy” rests on the belief—a centerpiece of the Green New Deal and other similar proposals both here and in Europe—that the technologies of wind and solar power and battery storage are undergoing the kind of disruption experienced in computing and communications, dramatically lowering costs and increasing efficiency. [...] The high energy density of the physical of months, barely two hours of national electricity chemistry of hydrocarbons is unique and well demand can be stored in the combined total of all the understood, as is the science underlying the low energy utility-scale batteries on the grid plus all the batteries in density inherent in surface sunlight, wind volumes, the 1 million electric cars that exist. [...] The assumption that gas prices will go up is at variance with the fact that they To address at least one issue with using LCOE as a tool, have decreased over the past decade and the evidence the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently pro- that low prices are the new normal for the foreseeable posed the idea of a “value-adjusted” LCOE, or VALCOE, future.30 Adjusting the LCOE calculation to refl. [...] 62 The relevance for the new energy economy vision: 70% of China’s grid is fueled by coal today and will still be at 50% in 2040.63 This A key rationale for the pursuit of a new energy economy means that, over the life span of the batteries, there is to reduce environmental externalities from the use would be more carbon-dioxide emissions associated of hydrocarbons.