Report: Biden’s Energy Plan Is a ‘Dangerous Delusion’

President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress as Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy listen, in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 7, 2023. TNS

In his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden declared that he would “finish the job” of what he calls the “incredible transition” from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis,” Biden said, referring to $370 billion in new government spending for renewable energy, which will result in “lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, and leading the world to a clean energy future.”

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry echoed that sentiment, declaring that the solution to a changing climate was “money, money, money, money, money.” Not to be outdone, former Vice President Al Gore, stated at the U.N. Cop 27 climate summit in November that fossil fuels were “a culture of death” and demanded $4.5 trillion dollars per year to replace the oil and gas industry with wind, solar, and batteries.

The threat to humanity, activists say, is so dire that cost should not be a factor. But for those who may be curious about costs, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a professor at Northwestern University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, has attempted to calculate them.

The task of replacing fossil fuels is immense: currently oil powers 97 percent of all the world’s transportation; natural gas accounts for 40 percent of all industrial energy use and 25 percent of global electricity; and coal powers 40 percent of global electricity and 70 percent of steel production. Overall, 84 percent of the world’s energy usage comes from fossil fuels.

The transition to renewables entails “going from a system dominated by liquid hydrocarbons and gaseous hydrocarbons to one dominated by solid minerals and rocks and metals,” Mills told The Epoch Times. Because minerals are less energy dense than fossil fuels, he said, “it takes, depending on the machines, somewhere between 1,000 percent and 5,000 percent greater use of minerals to produce the same amount of energy.”

In his report, “The ‘Energy Transition’ Delusion: A Reality Reset,” Mills writes: “Despite ever-escalating rhetoric, an ‘energy transition’ away from society’s dependence on hydrocarbons is not feasible in any meaningful time frame, and it is a dangerous delusion to base policies on the idea that such a transition is possible … the realities of the physics, engineering, and economics of energy systems are not dependent on any beliefs about climate change.”

“If you build machines, like wind turbines and [electric] cars instead of conventional hydrocarbon machines, that’s a big increase in the quantity of metals and minerals you have to mine,” Mills explained. “All the mining is done with oil-burning machines, and all the resins to make wind turbine blades are done with hydrocarbons. All the concrete and steel require metallurgical coal, natural gas, and oil. So you don’t avoid [fossil fuels], you just use less of them, but then you use a lot more minerals, and a lot more mining is required.”

Energy economics is a matter of trade-offs. In this case, it is a government-imposed trade of hydrocarbon energy, in which the United States is largely self-sufficient, for a mineral-based economy that is dependent on an international supply chain with China at its hub.

The Cost of Mineral Mining

The supply chain begins with the mining of raw materials. According to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an advocate of renewables, the “shift from a fuel-intensive to material-intensive energy system” will require the following increases in the production of minerals by 2040: 4,200 percent for lithium, 2,500 percent for graphite, 1,900 percent for nickel, and 700 percent for rare earths.

These minerals must be dug up, sifted, shipped, processed, refined, and manufactured into components for wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. The increased demand for these minerals to meet the goals of the transition would divert half of the world’s current aluminum and copper production, and 80 percent of the world’s nickel production toward solar panels and wind turbines.

The IEA report, titled “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transition,” puts it diplomatically: “Today, the data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to realising those ambitions.”

“Meeting such unprecedented demands will require opening far more mines than now exist, and far faster than at any time in history,” Mills writes. As it is, global mining today already uses about 40 percent of all global industrial energy, primarily generated from fossil fuels.

As demand escalates for increasingly scarce minerals, prices will inevitably escalate as well, and we are already seeing signs of that. Lithium prices, for example, rose from 100,000 Chinese yuan per ton in 2018 to more than 500,000 yuan per ton in 2022.

A report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also an advocate for renewables, predicts that prices of minerals for renewables will hit historical peaks “for an unprecedented, sustained period of roughly a decade in the IEA’s net-zero emissions scenario. This would imply that real prices of nickel, cobalt, and lithium would rise several hundred percent from 2020 levels, while the copper price would increase more than 60 percent.”

The rising cost of minerals will not only drive up the cost of renewables; it will also drive up prices across all other manufacturing that uses these mineral inputs. According to Mills’ report, “the entire 20th century was a period of slow decline in average mineral prices, a beneficial trend that began to reverse only a decade ago and [price increases are] poised to accelerate if transition plans are pursued.”

“We’re already seeing shortages of the basic kit for the grid, including transformer wire,” Robert Bryce, author of “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations,” told The Epoch Times. “I don’t see how we’re going to have this massive build out when we’re already short of these key components.”

Energy Storage

One of the benefits of fossil fuels is that they are mobile and easily stored. This is essential when producing electricity because demand is highly variable depending on weather, seasons, and the time of day. Utilities must have the capacity to meet peak consumer demand whenever it occurs.

According to Mills, it costs less than $1 per barrel per month to store fossil fuels, which has allowed for the construction of a power grid in America that delivers electricity whenever it is needed at a cost of less than 3 percent of GDP. America typically has one-to-two months of demand stored up in reserve for each type of fossil fuel.

Wind and solar by contrast only operate when the weather cooperates and are generally only cost effective in locations that are particularly sunny or windy, which requires the installation of thousands of miles of copper or aluminum transmission wires to connect them to the grid. Wind turbines cannot operate when temperatures drop below about minus-22 degrees Fahrenheit. Fossil fuel and nuclear power are increasingly being used as a backstop, a secondary source when wind and solar are dormant.

Some have suggested that batteries can be used to store renewable energy instead; however, using current lithium battery technology, it would cost more than $30 to store the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil.

“To put this bluntly,” Mills states, “at today’s and likely future prices, building enough batteries to store 12 hours of electricity for the U.S. would cost about $1.5 trillion, and that scale of storage would still leave the nation regularly third-world dark.” The cost for building weeks of national electricity storage with fossil fuels is about $100 billion.

Regardless, America’s rush to renewables means that about one-quarter of the coal production plants are scheduled to be shut down by 2029, according to the IEA. This is like “running while tying your shoes,” John Moura, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. (NERC), told The Epoch Times.

At the same time, subsidies for electric cars and looming bans on internal combustion engines, gas home heating, and even gas stoves, put ever more pressure on the electric grid.

“The electric grid is already cracking under existing demand,” Bryce said. “The idea that we should put all of our transportation energy needs, our home energy needs, and our commercial needs onto the electric grid is destined to fail because the grid simply can’t handle that kind of load today, and I very seriously doubt that we’ll be able to handle it in 10 or even 20 years.”

America’s Increasing Dependence on Foreign Nations

In terms of strategic exposure, the minerals for renewables are found primarily outside America’s borders and are more heavily concentrated in a small number of countries than, for example, oil production among OPEC countries. China is currently the world’s top producer of aluminum and produces 80 percent of polysilicon, both essential transition materials, as well as being the source of 60 percent of rare earth minerals.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces more than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt. Russia produces 10 percent of the world’s nickel. Chile produces 20 percent of the world’s copper.

A report by the Brookings Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, states that “China currently controls most global critical minerals refining, and its upstream control of raw commodities is also increasing.

“Crucially, it controls much of the world’s EV battery manufacturing, as well as the manufacturing of wind turbines, solar panels, energy storage, and electric transmission, among other applications. As things stand, the world is highly dependent on sourcing from China to advance the energy transition and meet decarbonization goals.”

“[Energy Secretary] Jennifer Granholm loves to talk about the OPEC cartel, and I agree it is a cartel,” Daniel Turner, executive director of Power the Future, told The Epoch Times. “But if we’re unshackling ourselves from OPEC, only to shackle ourselves to [Chinese head] Xi Jinping, we’re not really making progress.”

Western governments are spending billions to bring some of this production within their borders, but given that the majority of raw materials are located abroad and often under Chinese control, American manufacturing of renewable machines will be limited to final assembly at best. The Biden administration has been active in both subsidizing mining and blocking it on environmental grounds.

Biden used the Defense Production Act to classify lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and manganese as essential to national security, giving the green light to the Defense Department to subsidize domestic mining. At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been aggressive in halting new mines. Most recently, on Jan. 31, the EPA shot down the Pebble Mine project, which was to be one of America’s largest copper mines, near Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

Solutions to Meet America’s Energy Needs

The Biden administration insists that the transition is realistic and will be beneficial to Americans. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a division of the U.S. Energy Department, claimed in a paper titled “Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035” (pdf) that there are “a variety of scenarios that achieve a 100% clean electricity system (defined as zero net greenhouse gas emissions) in 2035 that could put the United States on a path to economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050.”

The report states that “based on assumed cost declines of renewable energy technologies, the pathway to achieving roughly 90% clean electricity is fairly consistent across the scenarios, and wind and solar provide the most generation in three of the scenarios, supplemented by significant nuclear deployment in the [fourth] scenario,” with various other technologies including carbon capture filling the gap. When asked by The Epoch Times to clarify their conclusions, however, the NREL declined to be interviewed.

As the Biden administration works to constrict domestic production of fossil fuels, global demand for them is increasing rapidly. Two countries that are not buying into the “incredible transition” are China and Russia. In 2021, China began construction of 33 gigawatts of coal-based energy production, which represents more than half of the world’s new coal-based plants.

Bryce stated in an October 2022 report that “in 2021, global hydrocarbon use grew nearly five times faster than the growth in wind and solar combined. Last year, just the increase in global hydrocarbon use … was roughly equal to the output of all of the wind and solar projects on Earth.” This despite global spending of $1.5 trillion on renewables between 2004 and 2019.

“The reasons are readily apparent,” Bryce stated. “Wind and solar simply cannot provide the staggering scale of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford.”

“Policymakers are beginning to grasp the enormous difficulty of replacing even a mere 10 percent share of global hydrocarbons—the share supplied by Russia—never mind the impossibility of trying to replace all of society’s use of hydrocarbons with solar, wind and battery (SWB) technologies,” Mills’ report states. “The only path to significantly lower energy prices while maintaining vibrant economies—and unlinking them from Russian oil and natural gas—is to radically increase the production of hydrocarbons.

“The U.S. holds the greatest potential for achieving this outcome, and without government subsidies,” he states. “On the contrary: increasing production of these energy sources would generate government revenues, increase U.S. geopolitical soft power, and, in due course, save the world trillions of dollars.”