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The Flea on the Behind of an Elephant
Scroll backwards in time to the early 1970s. US President Richard Nixon appointed the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to produce a study of recommendations on “The Nation’s Energy Future” based on advice from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Requesting the AEC for energy prognoses is akin to asking a tiger for dietary recommendations; there will surely be no vegetables on the menu! Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, chair of the AEC, predicted in her summation of the report that “solar would always remain like the flea on the behind of an elephant.” In the early 1980s I knew another eminent researcher, Dr. Thomas Henry Lee, a Vice President for research under Jack Welch at General Electric, who often stated that nuclear power would produce “energy that is too cheap to meter,” essentially free.
The AEC study, when it was published, proposed a $10 billion budget for research and development with half going to nuclear and fusion, while the rest would be spent on coal and oil. A mere $36 million was to be allocated to photovoltaics (PV). Dr. Barry Commoner, an early initiator of the environmental movement, was intrigued that the NSF had recommended such a paltry amount for solar. In the 1950s he had successfully lobbied for citizen access to the classified results of atmospheric nuclear tests and was able to prove that such tests led to radioactive buildup in humans. This led to the introduction of the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.
Dr. Commoner’s own slogan (the first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else) prompted him to question the AEC’s paltry allocation for solar PV, especially since he knew some of the members of the NSF panel who advised on the recommendations. He discovered the NSF panel’s findings were printed in a report called “Subpanel IX: Solar and other energy sources.” This report was nowhere to be found among the AEC’s documents until a single faded photocopy was unexpectedly discovered in the reading room of the AEC’s own library. The NSF’s experts had foreseen in 1971 a great future for solar electricity, predicting PV would supply more than 7% of the US electrical generation capacity by the year 2000 and the expenditure for realising the solar option would be 16 times less than the nuclear choice.
Clearly, the prediction of 7% solar electric generation has not yet happened, but current efficiency improvements in photovoltaics and battery storage technologies point the way to an energy future far beyond what the NSF predicted in 1971. Fifty years from now, it is nuclear power that is likely to be the flea on the behind of a solar elephant.
Love Oil, Hate Oil
The story of oil begins more than 2,500 years ago. Reliable indicators show that in China people were drilling a mile deep with bamboo pipes to recover natural gas and liquid hydrocarbons that were used as a source of fuel for fires. This was before the start of the Han dynasty in 400 BC. See this fascinating slide presentation on the progress of drilling technology by Allen Castleman, a self-confessed oil redneck.
Image: courtesy ecowas.com
The modern oil age is popularly considered to have started in the 19th century with the use of internal combustion engines for everything from pumping water to transportation. A glorious age, but now it’s time to move on (pun intended) to other fuels. As Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani predicted more than three decades ago, “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil;” a statement at once prescient, rueful and flippant. In today’s lugubrious world, they don’t make oil ministers like that any more.
As a reminder that the world turns and turns and comes full circle in more ways than one, here’s a parting thought; an article from the Guardian of 30 January 2014. In 2013 alone, China installed more solar power than the entire installed capacity in the US, the country where the technology was invented. There is a caveat to the article that some of this newly installed capacity is not yet connected to the grid but, once installed, connections are only a matter of time.
Terrorism and Climate Change: A Single Solution
Two thirds of the world’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels.
Much of the world’s wars and terrorism occur in the Middle East where, not so coincidentally, much of the world’s oil also originates. A lot of the world’s climate change problem (the majority of the world by now admits that there is a problem) is due to burning fossil fuels. In 2013, oil provided around 33% of global primary energy consumption* (i.e. energy contained in fuels used to generate electricity, heating, industry, transportation or other end users). This amounts to nearly 87 million barrels of oil per day. One third of this oil came from the Middle East.
The World Coal Association states that (in 2013): Coal provides around 30.1% of global primary energy needs, generates over 40% of the world’s electricity and is used in the production of 70% of the world’s steel. Coal is more democratically distributed around the world than oil, and there is not much likelihood of wars being fought over coal reserves. Coal is also a relatively “dirty” fuel and produces more CO2 (ca. 200) per unit of energy delivered than oil (ca. 150) or natural gas (117).
A listing of principal terror groups in the world includes ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, Ansar al-Sharia, Hezbollah and Hamas. Al-Jazeera news notes that the United Arab Emirates published this week a list of 80 organisations worldwide, including the foregoing, that it formally identified as terrorists. Some of the organisations on that list perhaps do not belong there, but the larger point to be made in this article still holds. When great wealth flows from all parts of the world into the hands of a few, great disparities ensue; injustice and violence occur. The world needs to get off its greed for oil and move to renewable sources of energy. Of course the transition will be painful; but less disruptive than continued terror. Reduced global oil consumption can lessen the flow of disproportionate wealth that the world directs into the coffers of a few by 20 to 30% in the next ten years.
Is the transformation do-able within this time frame? The world’s experts are divided fairly equally between yes and no. Why? Because it hasn’t been done before. But here is an indirect answer. The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) has revised its estimates for deployment of renewables worldwide upwards several times in the past decade. The forecasts made in 2002 for the year 2020 were exceeded by the year 2010. So perhaps the correct answer is not to be found among energy experts but in a quote from Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875 – 1939) who said:
Caminante, no hay camino
Se hace camino al andar.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
Paraphrased less poetically into modern business-speak: walk the walk, don’t simply talk! We have to make choices as individuals before nations and governments follow in our footsteps.
*For more background, see Energy Trends Insider, with links to BP’s widely used Statistical Review of World Energy 2014. Oil accounted for 33 percent of all the energy consumed in the world in 2013. This amounts to 86.8 million barrels per day. Of this, roughly 32% came from the Middle East.
http://www.ren21.net/Portals/0/documents/activities/gfr/REN21_GFR_2013.pdf
Fossil Fuels to Renewables: Cost of Transition
How much would it cost to transition our #energy system from #fossilfuels to #renewables? A new study from IIASA Energy researchers shows that while large increases in investment are needed, the overall cost is not much more than what we currently invest in fossil fuels. (IIASA: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a think-tank based in Laxenburg, Austria)
2 Recent Books: Burning Question, and Burning Answer
The burning question was asked in May 2013 by Mike Berners-Lee, Duncan Clark and Mill McKibben. The Burning Answer was published a year later, in May 2014 by Keith Barnham, a physicist with practical experience in industry. The topics raised in these two books, the questions posed, and the answers to them will change the world in the coming decades.
The Burning Question: We can’t burn half the world’s oil, coal and gas. So how do we quit?
by Mike Berners-Lee, Duncan Clark and Bill McKibben
May 2013
The Burning Question reveals climate change to be the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history. It shows that carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards, following an exponential curve that goes back centuries. One reason is that saving energy is like squeezing a balloon: reductions in one place lead to increases elsewhere. Another reason is that clean energy sources don’t in themselves slow the rate of fossil fuel extraction.Tackling global warming will mean persuading the world to abandon oil, coal and gas reserves worth many trillions of dollars — at least until we have the means to put carbon back in the ground. The burning question is whether that can be done. What mix of politics, psychology, economics and technology might be required? Are the energy companies massively overvalued, and how will carbon-cuts affect the global economy? Will we wake up to the threat in time? And who can do what to make it all happen?
The Burning Answer: A user’s guide to the solar revolution
by Keith Barnham
May 2014
Our civilisation faces a choice. We could be enjoying a sustainable lifestyle but we have chosen not to. In three generations we have consumed half the oil produced by photosynthesis over eight million generations. In two generations we have used half our uranium resources. With threats from global warming, oil depletion and nuclear disaster, we are running out of options. Solar power, as Keith Barnham explains, is the solution. In THE BURNING ANSWER he uncovers the connections between physics and politics that have resulted in our dependence on a high-carbon lifestyle, which only a solar revolution can now overcome. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 led to the atomic bomb and the widespread use of nuclear energy; it has delayed a solar revolution in many countries. In a fascinating tour of recent scientific history, Keith Barnham reveals Einstein’s other, less famous equation, the equation the world could have relied on.
Einstein’s other equation has given us the laptop and mobile phone, and it also provides the basis for solar technology. Some countries have harnessed this for their energy needs, and it is not too late for us to do the same.
In this provocative, inspiring, passionately argued book, Keith Barnham outlines actions that any one and all of us can take to make an impact now and on future generations. THE BURNING ANSWER is a solar manifesto for the new climate-aware generation, and a must-read for climate-change sceptics.
Peter Forbes, writing in the Guardian, has published thoughtful reviews of both these important books.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/31/burning-question-berners-lee-review
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/22/burning-answer-solar-revolution-keith-barnham-review
Fuel from Seawater: a conversation with my grandfather
My grandfather died in 1962 at the age of 76, so the heading is merely a hook to underline the passage of time and relativate (verb?) the content of this posting. If the idea of making fuel from seawater seems preposterous, try to picture the news as seen through my grandfather’s eyes. I was fortunate to go on many long walks with him before he died. I was in my early teens then, and he was in his seventies. My grandfather was a retired physician, a surgeon. He was born in 1888, as a subject of Queen Victoria, and at the time of his death, India had become an independent republic. He studied at the Madras Medical College, an institution that the then governor of the East India Company, named Yale, was instrumental in developing in the late 1600s. Thirty years later around 1720, Elihu Yale was the benefactor of another college on another continent, also a British colony at the time. Yale College and University were subsequently named after him. My grandfather proudly told me that one of his mentors at Madras Medical was Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, who was among the first women graduates of medicine in the world, and certainly the first Indian woman to do so, at a time when women were not allowed to join medical colleges in Britain.
As a freshly qualified young surgeon in the early 1900s my grandfather was 24 years old when the world’s first radio distress signals at sea began to come from the Titanic in April 1912. During his lifetime, he experienced the birth of wireless radio transmission, saw the first motion pictures, watched telephones become a part of everyday life, began to use antibiotics to ward off post-operative infections, and flew in Mr. de Havilland’s new-fangled Comet jetliner. So what would he have made of the news that the US Navy will power ships with fuel made after extracting carbon dioxide from seawater or that a University-based research group has perfected a solar cell that produces electricity from sunlight with conversion efficiencies of upto 43%? As a comparison, the solar cells that are commonly seen on rooftop arrays today have efficiencies ranging from 10 to 18%. I believe he might have been surprised, but would have quickly taken the news in his stride. After the monumental changes witnessed in his lifetime, the two developments above might seem to be fairly insignificant. But these technologies are potential game changers. Here’s why.
With efficiencies of over 40%, utility scale solar farms become feasible and cost effective, producing electricity at prices below that of conventional power plants. To make fuel from seawater, carbon dioxide and hydrogen are first extracted from it using a catalytic converter. This mixture is then converted by polymerisation to longer chain hydrocarbons which are the building blocks for a range of fuels of different grades for ships, cars and aircraft. The entire process is carbon neutral because the carbon used for combustion is extracted from the environment. Too good to be true? At the moment, yes. The process is roughly at the stage where the Wright brothers’ heavier-than-air flying machine was in the early 1900s.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/13/newser-navy-seawater-fuel/7668665/
In the link below, it states that we are 60% towards cost-effective utility scale solar power. Cells with almost three-fold efficiency gains will produce electricity at lower cost than conventional plants today.
http://www.energy.gov/articles/us-utility-scale-solar-60-percent-towards-cost-competition-goal
Clean and green vs. might and blight Many acquaintances who are not averse to renewables but are still captive to the current energy paradigm, remark that wind and solar farms take up too much space and that too many windmills or panels are a blot on the landscape. But so are open cast mines, oil wells, fracking sites and many of the other wonderful extractive technologies that power much of the world today. Just because they are tucked away in remote places does not make them any less environmentally destructive. The images below speak for themselves.
Which brings me back to my grandfather. World population doubled in his lifetime, but there were still large chunks of virgin territory around the globe. Today there are 7.2 billion of us around and it behooves us to tread lightly on this planet and conserve what we can of its considerable beauty. We owe it to our children and grandchildren, if not to ourselves.
Taking the Wind out of Superstorms
Traditional electricity generating power plants burn fossil or nuclear fuels and are massive chunks of infrastructure that take years or decades (in the case of nuclear plants) to build, cost billions of dollars, and then are in place to produce power for 50 years or more. They are gigantic investments in building and capital that cannot be lightly dismissed or shut down (i.e. we are locked-in to this technology for several decades). The people who control these massive infrastructures are rich and powerful and have often worked very hard to bring these projects to fruition. They (and their company’s shareholders) are, very understandably, not easily persuaded that their life’s work belongs to a changing (and soon to be outdated) paradigm; that of large, centrally controlled power plants, burning fossil fuels to provide reliable electricity for all in the neighbourhood. Instead, the growth of renewable technologies, especially wind and PV solar, means that you and I can conceivably have backyard or rooftop systems that can provide all the electricity we consume. Right now, these systems are unaffordable to most of us because the homes we live in were designed in an era of low-cost energy and take little advantage of passive design to minimise energy use. So at the moment, established wisdom and societal inertia still favour the old paradigm. The economics of renewables vary wildly depending on government regulations in different countries around the world.
Mark Jacobson is professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and has spent the last 20+ years developing computer models of different energy technologies and their effects on emissions, air pollution and climate. Based on his extensive modelling work and studies, he says that wind, water and solar power (WWS) can be scaled up in cost-effective ways to meet our energy demand; in his words, a “smart mix” of of renewable sources can do the job. Because the wind blows during stormy conditions when the sun does not shine and the sun often shines on calm days with little wind, combining wind and solar can go a long way toward meeting demand, especially when geothermal provides a steady base and hydroelectric can be called on to fill in the gaps (Scientific American, 2010). In 2010, Jacobson and co-author Mark deLucchi postulated in 2 articles, published in the journal Energy Policy, that the world of 2030 could be powered by renewables alone. A daunting task, but here’s why it could be done.
In May 1961, the president of a nation announces that his country will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Despite doubts that this can be done, both civil society and all branches of government align together to achieve the goal, just 8 years and 2 months after the announcement. The key to this achievement was alignment, unthinkable in today’s US, polarised as it is between two mutually antagonistic parties. Similarly, the WWS global energy strategy proposed by Jacobson is doable, provided there is sufficient alignment between nations that these goals are desirable and doable. Another stumbling block in the path of international alignment are the corporations (and the powerful people who run them) that are locked-in to fossil fuel technologies mentioned in the first paragraph above.
Jerome Dangerman is a thoughtful Dutchman who has worked in energy companies and academia, and has studied the problem of technological lock-in. He suggests a way out of the impasse lies in making shareholders pay for environmental damage. With such measures, investments will flow towards companies that produce energy sustainably.
A recent study by Jacobson et al. also point to another, remarkable benefit of renewables. Large arrays of offshore wind turbines could significantly reduce storm surges and weaken hurricane damage to the extent that the billions of dollars of damage avoided are themselves a powerful economic argument for putting up these electricity generators, not counting the value of the electricity they produce.
References: Jacobson, Mark Z.; Delucchi, M.A. (November 2009).“A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030” (PDF).Scientific American 301 (5): 58–65.
Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi (30 December 2010). “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials”. Energy Policy.
Jerome Dangerman: http://www.ru.nl/businessadministration/@923898/pagina/
Taming Hurricanes with Arrays of Offshore Wind: http://mashable.com/2014/02/26/offshore-wind-weaken-hurricanes/
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/full/nclimate2120.html
Note: Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, some of these articles are available only to subscribers
Renewables: The Experts are often wrong…
The world’s newspapers have lately been filled with climate doom and gloom. Most reports are undoubtedly accurate and there is room for alarm. However, millions of forward-thinking, innovative, entrepreneurial brains have been at work, and many courageous investors have risked billions of their money in renewable energy. This side of the picture is not highlighted often enough. Here’s an attempt to redress the balance.
Environmental Research Web has the following comment about predictions made in the recent past:
…REN21 have produced a very timely review of renewables progress and prospects drawing on interviews with 170 energy experts around the world. It set the scene by reminding us that many past projections have been overtaken by reality: ‘the International Energy Agency in 2000 projected 34 GW of wind power globally by 2010, while the actual level reached was 200 GW. The World Bank in 1996 projected 9 GW of wind power and 0.5 GW of solar PV in China by 2020, while the actual levels reached in 2011, nine years early, were 62 GW of wind power and 3 GW of solar PV’.
Looking forward, in the interviews, most industry experts believed that the world could reach at least 30-50% shares of renewables long term. And some advocated 100% or near-100% futures. European experts cited higher shares just for Europe, with many saying that Europe could attain 50-70% shares.
See the link below for a full copy of the Renewable Energy Policy Network’s REN21 Global Futures Report, released in January this year.
http://www.ren21.net/REN21Activities/GlobalFuturesReport.aspx
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