#WW(B)S
Some Debunking of Mark Jacobson's Disneyland Teleportation Device
In Never Stop Exploiting we quoted a long passage from Saifedean Ammous’ excellent work The Fiat Standard. To repeat again:
Any person with a familiarity with the engineering realities of modern life will realize that the policies and demands of fiat people when it comes to energy are as reasonable as the child who wants to go to Disneyland but throws tantrums refusing to get into the car taking him to Disneyland because he doesn’t want to get into the car; he just wants to get into Disneyland. It is difficult to communicate to a child in a tantrum that the car is his only realistic option for getting to Disneyland and that the only possible alternative is walking for days and not some magical teleportation device. This is exactly the plight of trying to explain to fiat people that hydrocarbons are the only reason most of our modern life is possible, that working alternatives cannot be conjured by fiat, and that the only realistic alternative is grinding poverty and a precarious existence, not some absurd Star Trek world where all that we want materializes with the flick of a switch without any combustion taking place. Just like the child who wants to be teleported to Disneyland should present their teleportation device before throwing a tantrum, it is time “it is time for fiat fuel enthusiasts to first show the rest of us how they can survive on fiat fuels before demanding we give up the hydrocarbons that are essential for our survival.
- from The Fiat Standard by Saifedean Ammous
If there’s anybody in the Fiat Energy space who best describes the tantrum-throwing Disneyland teleporting child Saif mocks in this passage it’s likely that Professor (and Civil Engineer) Mark Jacobson.
Jacobson is famous for his claims that society can move completely away from conventional hydrocarbons and to a 100% “renewable” energy society. He’s also per, The Guardian’s “Environment Editor” Damian Carrington, “controversial” for , as Carrington states, “pursuing a $10m lawsuit against researchers who claimed his work was flawed, which he later dropped.” Carrington in the typical “the Corporate Press is factual but not truthful” style.
Carrington’s fine journalism was previously covered too here in The Knowledge System and its Discontents left a few things out.
Jacobson’s main claim to fame is that society could run completely on renewable energy using existing technology (plus battery storage) scaled up to astronomical terms but was found to be based on modeling errors and pie-in-the-sky assumptions. Par for the course, if you ask us, when it comes to many fiat academics and fiat energy enthusiasts. For anyone familiar with the nooks-and-cranies of the bike advocacy world where similar fiat-minded “civil engineers” exist, this is no surprise.
That’s, well, the Disneyland teleportation device he’s presented.
Jacobson’s famous mantra is wind, water, solar, or #WWS.
Or as we say, #WWBS, with the “B” standing for both “batteries” and “bull.”
Robert Bryce covered this as he put it “new record in thin-skinned-ness” lawsuit in a 2017 piece An Environmentalist Sues over an Academic Disagreement. Jacobson asserted in the suit his detractors made him and his team“look like poor, sloppy, incompetent, and clueless researchers.” (Fact Check: duh!). Among many of this issues with his (and team’s) 100% WWS fantasy was that he vastly overestimated the potential of hydroelectric power. These detractors published their critique in an open academic journal which offered the space for Jacobson and his team to refute these refutations. One of the points of academic research is to use these journals as a platform for such back and forth.
Had Jacobson not thrown such a childish tantrum about it by taking it to the court room, most people outside this small sliver of academia would have likely not known what was happening. The Streisand Effect is a powerful drug and now far more people have seen Jacobson’s true colors.
The defendants counter-sued, DC Superior Court Judge Wingo viewed Jacobson’s suit as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (aka SLAPP) suit, which are illegal in many jurisdictions as they’re often intended to shut proper debate.
Jacobson is now supposed to be paying back the money lost by the original defendants. Hopefully he didn’t keep his funds in Silicon Valley Bank!
Jacobson is so high on his pompous supply that he even asserts his papers (well, the third one is a 2009 Scientism American article) provide “the scientific bases for all US state laws and proposed laws to go 100% renewable, clean, 0-C [carbon] and/or 0-emissions & the #GreenNewDeal.”
On the California front, it’s likely his work influenced at least some of the state and local government’s unrealistic laws and “plans.”
Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio have also embraced Jacobson’s ideas.
Jacobson’s famous chant is wind, water, solar to the point where he uses the phrase as if it’s a magic spell much like what the woke do and even adding the # symbol on social media for extra effect after many of his posts.
Nuclear is missing from his mix and in fact he’s notoriously anti-nuclear. In fact, one of the best ways to see into the mind of Jacobson, is to see how hysteric he gets over nuclear.
Twitter, of course is the perfect medium for this as it’s the only way non-anointed plebs can interact with His Highness.
That is until they get blocked which is what he’s done to much of Energy Twitter.
In that sense, Jacobson is essentially the Peter Flax of the energy world.
Earlier this week he tweeted:
Roughly an hour and a half later he retweeted that post with the following text tagging both the CA Governor and the UK Prime Minister:
Along with his prescription for how to get it done.
Oof!
Let’s take these statements one by one.
"On 3/12, Calif's batteries produced 3.02 GW, or 12% of CA's 7:35PM peak demand of 25.2 GW"
CAISO's Supply Trend for the date of March 12th, 2023 at the time of 7:35 PM indeed confirms these figures.
"Peak" demand is an important thing to note which we'll return to later.
The peak demand is the absolute highest number on that chart. It’s just slightly over 26 GW, not at 25.2 GW.
"That's more than Diablo Canyon's 2GW Output"
Diablo's output was 2.25 GW. Diablo’s Nameplate Capacity is often cited as 2256 MW, or 2.256 GW. CAISO is rounding to the nearest hundredth of a GW.
Jacobson’s figure was 2GW, 11% off the actual figure.
Does Jacobson's 11% or his 25.2GW error matter? Probably not for back of the napkin math, but if Jacobson were to practice Civil Engineering and was off by even a sliver of such an amount, some unfavorable things might happen. Imagine his calculation being this far off on a structural design or a concrete mix?
Jacobson also asserts his models are accurate and worthy of being adopted by governments in their climate change agendas.
Sorry, we don’t make the rules.
Onward:
"Charged 3x/day, these 4-h batteries can supply 13.2 THr/y, or 81% DC's output, but with 150% of DC's peak output"
Speaking first of accuracy in “models,” Jacobson is insisting the entire fleet of grid-storage batteries in California all run the same way as if they’re one giant power plant and the transmission, substation, and distribution system can handle it all the same. CA’s batteries don’t run that way, we’ll prove that later.
This gross oversimplification of a immensely complex system is an example of copperplate modeling. If there’s ever a great application for the “The Map is not the Territory” concept, it’s the reductionist modeling methods used by Jacobson here.
This first part what he says above too is a fancy way of saying, whether Jacobson intended or not, that the battery capacity factor is around 50%.
For those familiar with the concept of capacity factor and the various factors for different generation might see that’s somewhat of an own for Team Battery compared to Team Nuclear - which Jacobson oddly frames negatively in another post by its downtime.
Diablo Canyon is in the high 80s or even low 90s, as is typical with nuclear power plants. For our calculations, and Jacobson's (see tweet), a capacity factor of 90% was used.
As a side note, Jacobson admitted in a reply to Fordney - star of our piece The Anti-Rural, Divisive LA Times Gets Schooled - that he knows Diablo Canyon's capacity factor is around 90%. Framing it as “down 10% of the year,” is about as “the cup is really half empty” as one can get.
Onto the math…
To get to a Terawatt-hours per year unit, one must multiply the power by the capacity factor and by the number of hours in a year.
Power [watts] * Capacity Factor [unitless] * 8750 [number of hours in a year] = watt-hours/year
Megawatts, just like megabits in computer data transmission (both are million) get to large numbers real fast, hence the desire often to use giga, and terra. Same applies here.
If Diablo Canyon's nameplate capacity is 2250MW which is also what the CAISO figure shows for energy provided at Sunday's peak (Jacobson incorrectly stated it's 2000 MW), then its net energy output.
(Using Jacobson’s incorrect value would result in 15,760,000 MWhr/yr. )
The battery math is:
The figures above would be 17.74, 15.76, and 13.23 TWhr/yr respectively.
Jacobson’s battery output from the tweet above is correct, at 13.2 TWhr/yr.
Using either the correct or incorrect figures for Diablo does not get his 81% output claim though.
Recalling what he wrote:
"Charged 3x/day, these 4-h batteries can supply 13.2 THr/y, or 81% DC's output, but with 150% of DC's peak output"
13.23 is just shy of 75% of 17.74 - not 81% as Jacobson claimed.
15.76 is 89% of 17.74 too.
His caveat of "but with 150% of DC's peak output," makes no sense here.
It’s in a later tweet where he’s more specific.
"Data show how obsolete Diablo Canyon #nuclear is v batteries. Batteries ramp up+down in a millisecond. DC doesn't ramp.
CA Batteries meet 150% of DC's max output & can provide 4/5 its energy/y"
First, Jacobson's use of "data" here is quite dubious.
His claim that Diablo Canyon is "obsolete" versus batteries is also dubious.
There is hardly anything obsolete about a power plant that can crank out reliable (and carbon-free) electricity at the highest rated capacity factor of all power plants.
These statements of Jacobson are so utterly ridiculous for someone of his apparent stature - he’s showing the entire world he doesn’t understand some very basic concepts about the electrical grid.
It’s peak, pun intended, Fiat thinking.
Remember the reference to "Peak demand” in his tweets? Peak demand is typically met by peaker power plants- that is ones which in Jacobson’s words, “ramp up and down.”
Looking at almost any day on the CAISO supply grid shows two charge and discharge cycle per day for the batteries, not three. At the moment, California's battery storage systems provide something akin to peaker power with two charge and discharge cycles.
Try this out yourself by going here, scrolling down to the Batteries Trend chart, and change the date as many times as you desire. On most days, the trend looks more or less like this.
The batteries are charged overnight during low demand (often with natural gas) and are discharged in the morning as demand increases. Then during the day (often with abundant solar) they’re recharged. The last discharge cycle occurs at the usual peak hour demand - in the late afternoon and early evening just as the solar begins to increasingly disappear.
That makes this tweet his false.
Ironically, one day the batteries did not follow the two charge and discharge cycles wa March 12th - the same day Jacobson bragged about the greatness of the batteries. On that day, the morning discharge cycle was practically a rounding error with a sort of a double peak in the evening.
Perhaps it was chaos?
He's also correct that Diablo Canyon doesn't “ramp up and down” as looking at virtually any point in time throughout the CAISO supply data shows it humming around the same 2.2MW, except the 10% of the time it’s down (rolls eyes). But Jacobson misses the point that Diablo provides baseload power which by design is not intended for fast ramping up and down. Again, grid 101 stuff.
Where Jacobson is getting the idea that there could be a third charge and discharge cycle seems silly. Are other plants going to be forced to curtail for a few hours so the batteries can kick in for that third cycle?
This is Fiat thinking at its best.
As for the 150% figure. Best we can guess is he did more sloppy math by dividing battery output by Diablo’s output.
Using his incorrect figure for Diablo, one arrives at 1.5 times, or 151%. (3020/2000 = 1.51)
Or for the correct figure, a less impressive 134% (3020/2250 = 1.34)
Comparing an energy source that only momentarily provides a ballpark figure of 3000MW (or even if it did 50% of the time) versus one that supplies energy at 2250 MW around 90% of the time is so breathtakingly stupid, especially for someone of this caliber to make.
We’re really finding it hard to believe if that’s really what Jacobson may be saying here but then again we’re familiar with other “engineers” making preposterous claims which neglect elementary concepts in field.
They appear to “fail up” to into unaccountable positions, mainly funded by fiat. Schultheiss sits on both the Bicycle Technical Committee and the Pedestrian Task Force of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices which should scare the shit out of any bicyclist or pedestrian. Never trust, always verify. Especially if it’s covered by Streetsblog.
Circling back to Jacobson’s tweets, the final part of his second tweet, for review, said the following:
CA Batteries meet 150% of DC's max output & can provide 4/5 its energy/y"
As for “& can provide 4/5 its energy/y,” we can’t parse this one.
Is he claiming that batteries can currently provide 4/5 of all TW-hours per year of state’s electrical energy needs?
That seems awfully unlikely.
The last part of his tweet is interesting as well he wrote.
"CA batteries will double in 1-2 yr. Nuc takes 17-20 yr for one reactor "
Doubling the battery capacity, something likely similar to a "Could Grid" if there was ever one get us 26.28 GWh which is indeed 150% Diablo's current output and Jacobson's above claims.
Jacobson’s use of verb conjugation is confusing too. Using the verb "meet" without any modifiers such as "would" or "could" implies that present tense is being used. Jacobson is asserting that today's batteries provide this 150%. That's not the case.
Competent communication skills are essential for engineers too.
Naturally he triple-downed on all these claims by Tweeting his own earlier tweets.
Jacobson’s claims for slow buildout of nuclear plants is partially true and partially false. Wombat the EE, an account on Twitter who Jacobson eventually blocked, asked him what the 17-20 year figure was based, to which he replied “planning to operation time” and threw a citation to a 47 page long paper of his. He then added to finish the tweet, “It is the construction time plus the time for planning, permitting, and financing.”
We have a hunch that Jacobson has zero experience as a civil engineer with projects in the real world. Tends to happen to career academics.
Other pieces (Nuclear Waste by Doomberg and many by Shellenberger) show that government bureaucracies and anti-nuclear scaremongering is also at play for the slow buildout times for nuclear. Jacobson is one of the more prolific anti-nuclear "academics" in the US and is likely a huge part of this problem himself.
Just Diablo Canyon lives so successfully rent-free in his head that he asserts it’s blocking (currently non-existing) off-shore wind generation from accessing the state’s transmission grid too.
His tantrums is are often hilarious.
Watch, for example, how he gets his fiat whatever all in a bunch when someone points out that batteries have a finite lifespan.
Jacobson neglects reality again both on whether the state's battery capacity actually will double as there's an immense backlog of new generation projects waiting for CAISO approval before being allowed to actually connect to the transmission system.
Someone who says something such as this, “The total amount of mining that’s going to be needed for wind, water, solar, compared to [the] fossil fuel system, is much less than 1% in terms of the mass of materials.”
This isn't Sim City. Things don't just come out of thin air. The sky isn't the limit either, the limit is the ground itself and the energy required to mine all the materials for his battery utopia. That's not to mention the human labor, which in certain supply chains uses child and/or slave labor.
Does Jacobson realized he likely deceived tens of thousands of readers including potentially the Governor of California and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with his tweets? The former needs no additional misinformation fed into his mind. He does just fine on his own, thank you very much.
notes that wind, solar, and batteries - three of the four parts of Jacobson's Fiat Energy / Disneyland Teleportation Device at "Grift, clear as day."He absolutely nails it.
Even some on the inside are honest about it.
The opening quote in our early piece The Golden State’s Progressive Pig Iron Power , which criticized items such as Jacobson’s very own in-home solar setup, could not explain Jacobson’s fiat mindset any better.
“The humble are the cleverest, the privileged are the dumbest.” - Mao Zedong
With someone like Jacobson, analyzing his actions through any lens of good versus bad intentions irrelevant. This is delusion that will get people killed and cause far more environmental damage than one could imagine.
Jacobsen is a CIVIL engineer... dirt and rocks. We get a civil when we need soil samples taken for a tower foundation. That should be as close to electricity as a Civil Engineer should be allowed by law.
The apparent need for replacement of fossil fuels by more expensive and less reliable renewables is based upon an application of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concretenesss by the argument that is made by a climate model under which an "abstract" event of the future for Earth's climate system is mistaken for a "concrete" event of the future where an "abstract" event of the future is "abstracted" (removed) from a location in space and time whereas a "concrete" event of the future has such a location. For a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this mistake has the beauty.of weakening the United States against attack on it by the CCP. The CCP avoids weakening itself in this way by building coal plants instead of renewable sources of energy.