Where's the logic in our rush to renewable the world?

I’m coining a new phrase today: “to renewable.” “To renew” is taken, and it can mean a variety of refreshing tangents across a number of delightful industries---it’s especially popular with cosmetics companies---but “to renewable” is specific to just power and will represent our headlong rush to make everything inside our arena lean and green---and, therefore, more appealing.

After all, when we act, as a group, “to renewable,” we’ve pushed aside pesky things like global warming (or just air pollution for those conservatives still insisting that global warming isn’t real) and nuclear regulation and massive fuel reserves and dependence on foreign oil fields that are sometimes run by angry despots.

So, with the great rush “to renewable” we can solve a lot of social, cultural and fuel-related issues. We clean up the environment when we hunker down “to renewable,” and, yet, it doesn’t impact our World of Warcraft time together. And, even politicians can love “to renewable,” cuz that means we can, metaphorically, flip the bird at those angry despots we think are holding all the oil we need---gallons of political hostage.

But, in that great rush we also create an issue, a big ol’ tech issue that we’ve known about for years. See, your World of Warcraft time there at the computer may not be when the sun shines. In may be in the dark hours of the night when the rest of the world is sleeping. And, it may not be when the wind blows. It may be during a night of complete and utter calm. So, if the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s night shining when you sit down to play, you’re going to need power from another source because renewables are, for the most part, pesky in their intermittency.

Now the intermittency of our rush “to renewable” has, of course, been around since the dawn of power itself. We’ve know about it forever, and, in fact, it has kept us burning fossil fuels in recent history because renewables just weren’t reliable. But, now we’ve turned a corner, decided to forge ahead, made a pact “to renewable.” We’re resolved---yet, no one has solved that pesky “sun’s not always shining” issue.

Still, we don’t, as an industry, talk about it. It’s the elephant in the room that we’ve painted to match the wallpaper so it just doesn’t stand out quite as much. When we hear there will be change from the governments above us and hear an echoing call for change from consumers below us, we just don’t feel like we have a lot of choice but to disguise that problem. When we talk about those problems, the governments above us think we’re stalling and the consumers below us think we just want to keep the status quo because of money---and we're stalling. So, the rush is on. And, we’ll just do some camouflaging and be done with that elephant for as long as we can possibly ignore it.

But, intermittency is bound to have impact as we grow more and more dependent on renewables. You can’t hide an elephant that darn big forever.

European consultants Poyry recently completed a study on the growing push “to renewable” and how power based on weather patterns could impact the market. Among their findings (which focused on Northern Europe): “By 2030, wholesale market prices in some countries will have become highly volatile and driven by short-term weather patterns.”

Poyry’s report also noted that there will be more “peaks” in prices: When there are lots and lots of renewables all going at once, the price will death spiral, but when there is no renewable power option, the price will skyrocket. Intermittency leads to volatility. That’s the first major lesson of our rush “to renewable”: It’s going to be a rollercoaster ride for prices, if prices are open to a market based on the fickle whims of weather. Add in the costs of renewable subsidies and the cost of keeping a back-up in baseload, and now items are trending higher more often than they are trending lower. It may always regress to mean, but, in the future, that mean may be a significantly higher price mark.

While there are options to mitigate those crazy price spikes by interconnecting more renewables across more space (as the ability to push power over lines gets easier) and creating demand-side management programs, these concepts are band-aids for a wound that won’t stop bleeding (and those concepts involve convincing governments and consumers to work together for the good of the utility, which is often not so easy to sell). In the end, until we can find a way to logically solve the technical issue of intermittency our rush “to renewable” will always be plagued by a problematic lack of logic and not nearly enough serious thinking about practical solutions.

I want our attempts “to renewable” the world to work, but it seems like we’ve gotten caught up in the excitement and money available---the soap-opera drama of it all---and forgotten that there are, indeed, some valid reasons to burn stuff to make power. If we want to get away from burning stuff, we need to spend more time mulling over the issues before we run out of the house with saws and drills in hand to build, build, build those renewables.