Renewable Energy and Current Events

Here’s a blog post I put up on Renewable Energy World, addressing a question a friend posed: What part of your recent book (Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies) aligns most closely with the major news stories of the day? I mentally shuffled through the table of contents and answered that it’s probably the chapter on national security, my interview with James Woolsey, ex-Director of the United States CIA. Here are summaries of a few key points that Mr. Woolsey raised:

Grid Security of the Grid. Here, we don’t have the supply problem, i.e., the European-type problem where the Russians control the fuel for our electricity. Yet the aged nature of our transmission grid produces several big national security problems, including vulnerability of the transformers and other things terrorists could attack, hacking in the SCADA systems, and EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Oil Supply Vulnerability. The network is vulnerable to attack; if you take out the right buildings in Louisiana, you could really screw up control of the oil pipelines.

The Damage of Pollution to US Citizens. Boyden Gray, in his piece in the Texas Review of Law and Politics, puts the cost in damage to peoples’ health and medical costs total, at approximately $250 billion a year from the aromatics.

What Tom Friedman calls “Fill ‘er up with dictators.” There is an “oil curse,” meaning that an autocratic state, when it depends for a huge share of its income on a commodity that has a lot of economic rent attached to it, that rent tends to accrue to the central power of the state. The 22 countries that count on two-thirds or more of their national income from oil are autocratic kingdoms or dictatorships.

I’m always interested to see how the push for renewables is treated in the press, and how we somehow find a way to whitewash the truth -– as astonishingly bald as it is: day after day, the US hocks its future to the tune of an incremental $1 billion to buy oil from the bad guys. If you can convince me that there’s nothing sinister about this, I’m all ears.