Wind, water, solar and socialism. Part 2: electricity networks

Electricity systems: building blocks of a socialist view. Part 2 of 2. Download both parts here as a PDF

By Simon Pirani

The first part of this article dealt with the supply of energy by renewable electricity generation or by nuclear power. This second part focuses on how electricity networks are changing.

2.1. Is it really technologically possible to base electricity networks on renewables, since they produce electricity intermittently? Could there even be advantages?

There are already big electricity networks based on renewables, and more are on their way. Denmark generates 61% of its electricity from wind and solar, and a further 23% from modern biofuel use. Three of the largest European economies – Germany, the UK and Spain – generate 41%, 40% and 35% of their electricity from wind and solar, respectively, and that share will surely keep rising. Within these countries, variable renewables’ share of electricity generation is much greater in some places: in Scotland, a nation of 5.5 million people, it averaged 60% in 2019-21 and is growing. While variable renewables only contributes 16% of the USA’s electricity, their share in the state of California (which uses more electricity than most countries) is 43%, balanced with another 24% from hydro, 10.5% from nuclear and 22.5% from gas. And then there are nations such as Norway and Paraguay, where hydro power, a non-variable renewable resource, accounts for 88% and 99.5% of electricity generation respectively.[1]

A dispatch centre in Beijing that controls most of China’s ultra-high-voltage lines and monitors renewable electricity inputs. Photo from State Grid Corp of China

The growth of renewables is forcing two big changes to electricity networks: they are becoming less centralised, and bi- or multi-directional. The networks installed in rich countries in the first half of the 20th century, and across much of the global south in the second half, were designed to carry electricity in one direction: mostly from big coal, gas and nuclear power stations, to users. Peak centralisation was in the 1970s; combined heat and power plants, and power stations using combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) built in the 1980s and 90s, were smaller. As for wind farms, only the largest, with 100 or more turbines, are comparable in scale to coal-fired plants. Solar power mostly operates at still smaller scales: only about half of the world’s supply is from utility-scale solar farms; the rest is from rooftop panels. In China and Europe, the leading installers in recent years, more solar is being added as rooftop panels than as solar farms.[2]

The physical decentralisation of electricity generation is accompanied by growth of centralised operational coordination. As the number and type of electricity generators increases, networks – i.e. the “grid” of transmission lines, storage facilities and the computers that regulate flows – adapt to manage their inputs. This is part of the “third industrial revolution”, analogous in some respects e.g. with changes made by a committee that uses video conferencing (geographically disparate people using centralised operational technology to work), or a newspaper (geographically disparate reporters, editors and managers who in the last century produced a physical product distributed from one physical location, and now coordinate digitally to produce multiple digital products). 

Wind, water, solar and socialism. Part 1: energy supply

Electricity systems: building blocks of a socialist view. Part 1 of 2. Download both parts here as a PDF

By Simon Pirani

Worldwide, thousands of socialists are active in movements demanding action on climate change; many more participate in co-ops and community energy projects. But our collective efforts to map the transition away from fossil fuels, and how it relates to the transition away from capitalism, have fallen short, in my view. In particular, we need some starting-points for understanding how electricity systems are changing.

In this article[1] – both this first part on energy supply, and a second part on electricity networks – I suggest what these starting-points might be. It aims at clarification, including self-clarification, and I invite responses.

I include some polemical comments on recent would-be socialist arguments, by Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, supporting nuclear power against decentralised renewables.[2]

Workers inspecting a wind farm in Inner Mongolia, China

Here are some assumptions I start with. First, in the transition away from fossil fuels, electricity’s role will expand: not only will it be used to provide heat and light, for cooking and to drive appliances and machinery, but it will have to spread in transport and industry. This expansion is to be welcomed as a method of junking fossil fuels, but unless combined with measures to curb capital’s cycles of overproduction and overconsumption – and thereby cut total throughput of energy through economies – it will fail.[3]

Second, I think renewable electricity generation is in principle better than nuclear or doubtful, borderline technologies such as hydrogen and biofuels,[4] in part because of its potential for underpinning a collectively owned and controlled energy system. However, all good (and all bad!) outcomes will most likely involve a combination of technologies; each has its pros and cons, and socially-determined potentials for good or bad uses.

Communist Dissidents book free to download

Communist Dissidents in Early Soviet Russia: five documents translated and introduced by Simon Pirani is today published on People & Nature as a free-to-download PDF – in English here and in Russian here.

You can read three of the chapters on line: the Introduction, Appeal of the Workers Truth Group (chapter 4) and From Iosif Litvinov’s Diary (chapter 5). Все о книге на русском здесь.

The printed edition is also available, from the Troubadour on-line shop here.

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□ “These voices of rank-and-file worker communists, from the early 1920s, convey not only accurate diagnoses of the situation then, but also prophetic warnings of the consequences of the Bolshevik party’s bureaucratic degeneration and of workers’ alienation from control over power. This book is an important contribution to the study of early Soviet history, and necessary for understanding the overall legacy of those Soviet dissidents who criticised the ruling regime from the left, from socialist and democratic positions.” – Ilya Budraitskis, author of Dissidents Among Dissidents: ideology and the left in post-Soviet Russia (Verso, 2022)