From Trust, yet verify

On this blog, I already looked in some rather confusing fact-checks. There is for example the fact-checker who was struggling to find an example of someone actually making the claim he is fact-checking and the fact-checker who fact-checked a entirely different claim than he was set to do. I think there is a new contender in the latter category. This post will be about the ABC news fact-check titled:

Dick Smith says no country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables. Is that correct?”.

That is an interesting question! Although it would be simple to answer this question (just name the countries that have been able to run entirely on renewables), I had not much hope that it would be answered in this fact-check.

First some background. The claim comes from Dick Smith (an Australian entrepreneur and aviator) who made this claim in a 2GB radio interview as a reaction to the news that former labor MP Jennie George stated that Australia needs to look at nuclear because you can’t run a first world economy on renewables alone. This is Dick Smith’s reaction:

Look, I can tell you, this claim by the CSIRO that you can run a whole country on solar and wind is simply a lie. It is not true. They are telling lies. No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables – that’s impossible. So, we should be making a decision to go nuclear now.

So, to me it seems when Dick Smith talked about “renewables”, he meant solar and wind. I think most will know the answer to the question being fact-checked, but I became very curious how the fact-checker could wiggle himself out of that.

To his credit, the fact-checker asked feedback from Dick Smith and amended the fact-check accordingly, but unfortunately even that didn’t help his case whatsoever.

Tasmania
Let’s look at the first expert that the fact-checker presents. It is Mark Diesendorf who teaches sustainable energy and energy policy at the University of New South Wales. He obviously disagrees with Dick Smith, saying that “several countries (and Tasmania) already run their electricity grid on 100% renewables” and adding that they heavily rely on hydro power to achieve that.

Sure, but the fact-check is about the claim whether an entire country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables (meaning actually done that for all energy needs), not whether a country’s electricity grid could possibly run on renewables (meaning potentially just powering the grid). Which are two different questions.

But then, does Tasmania runs entirely on renewables, even when just focusing on the electricity grid? Looking at the energy in Tasmania, besides the combo solar/wind/hydro, there are also gas and import of electricity via the Basslink interconnector, connecting Tasmania with Victoria (which currently relies for more than half on coal).

Yet, their energy minister declared Tasmania entirely self-sufficient on renewables:

In a statement released on Friday, Tasmanian energy minister Guy Barnett said that state had effectively become entirely self-sufficient for supplies of renewable electricity, provided by the state’s wind and hydroelectricity projects.

How a grid could be 100% self-sufficient on renewables while gas and import are also in the mix, is explained a bit later in the article:

“When the final two turbines are commissioned at Granville Harbour, Tasmania will have access to 10,741 GWh of renewable generating capacity – well above our average annual electricity demand of 10,500 GWh,” Barnett added.

Aha! The “entirely self-sufficient for supplies of renewable electricity” doesn’t mean that Tasmanian grid could run on solar/wind/hydro alone, it means that solar/wind/hydro in Tasmania produce more than the annual average electricity demand, irrespective of the generated electricity actually is consumed in Tasmania. I would not call that 100% self-reliance on renewables.

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Science or Advocacy?
The second expert is Adrew Blakers, a professor of engineering at the Australian National University’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster solutions.. I recognize that name and unfortunately he seems to make a habit of making misleading statements.

The paper “100% renewable electricity in Australia” started with a graph showing the rapid growth of the installed capacity of solar PV and wind compared to other energy sources between 2014 and 2016. Fossil fuel capacity additions decreased while solar strongly increased and wind somewhat increased. Although the article is about Australia, the data in that graph is about the world. Recreating the graph for Australia showed that additions in that same period decreased, so referring to world data in a paper on Australia seem to be the better option to keep up the narrative.

He did similar things in a Conversation article, in which he compared (worldwide) additions of solar and wind capacity (60%) to all other power sources (40%) in order to prove the “dominance of PV and wind”. He however didn’t explain that the capacity factors of the other power sources are higher than solar and wind, so the actual production of those additions are lower for solar and wind compared to the rest.

In that same article, there is a graph showing the extrapolated exponential growth of (worldwide) solar and wind. However, the trend until that point showed a decreasing growth. That increasing exponential growth was most likely obtained by using the average of a decreasing growth and then use this average to extrapolate an increasing growth trend…

The advocacy seems strong in this expert and I don’t know where his science ends and his advocacy begins in his articles and paper. Also, the fact-check is not about whether a country can power its grid by renewables, but whether a country has ever been run on renewables for all its energy needs.

The four proposed countries
The third expert is Mark Jacobson who provides a list of four countries having a grid that is 100% powered by solar, wind and hydro in 2021: Albania, Bhutan, Nepal and Paraguay. Fine, but that is not the claim that is being fact-checked.

Dick Smith replied in the article that in 2021 renewables in Albania contributed 33.7% of the energy supply, 37.5% in Paraguay and 6.1% in Nepal.

AEMO chimes in
The fact-checker also gives the floor to the Australian Enery Market Operator (AEMO). They assured him that “renewables will be able to meet the entire demand of the national electricity market (NEM) by 2025, albeit for short periods of time (for example, 30 minutes)”.

Wonderful, only pity that there are 24 hours in one day, that they are talking about a forecast (not something that has already been done) and only about powering the grid (not all energy needs).

The wiggling out
That is pretty bad for the fact-check. How does the fact-checker finally wiggle himself out of this pickle? Well, by saying that it doesn’t matter anyway. He brings up the Grattan Institute claiming that Australia should only commit to “net zero emissions” (not “absolute zero emissions” or “100% renewable energy”) and this doesn’t require that all electricity used within a country comes from renewables (some might even come from coal or gas).

That is really ingenious, but there is however one tiny little problem with this fact-check. Remember, this is the statement that is being fact-checked:

The fact-check is about a statement of Dick Smith and none of those experts brought up in the fact-check showed that this statement is wrong. The only answer to the question “Which country has ever been able to run on renewables alone” is that no country has ever been able to do that yet, but the fact-checker skillfully evaded answering that question.

Basically, the fact-check is a most elaborate way of explaining that Dick Smith is correct, while avoiding actually saying that Dick Smith is correct.