Energy Policy – Hitting the Broad Side of the Barn
I’ve been thinking about my up-coming meeting with Dr. Raj Pachauri, who, among other things, serves as the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Pondering this in advance of the meeting, I wonder what I would do, given the power, to deal with climate change.
I suppose the overarching principle I would use is prioritization. Why take on an issue that is contributing a microscopically small amount to climate change? Why not try to hit the broad side of the barn? I guess it will be cool when I can charge my cell phone using a solar photovoltaics (PV) fabric that’s woven into my hat, but that’s hardly going to change the world.
Here are four rough concepts that actually make a huge difference. Note that, in each case, the required technology already exists; there is no need to pull a rabbit out of a hat; in fact, my favored solutions are listed among the business opportunities on the 2GreenEnergy website.
1) Because people in developing nations have limited access to modern modes of generating energy, they tend to burn hydrocarbons, mostly wood and animal dung, for cooking and lighting; obviously, this contributes significantly to pollution in various forms. We need a micro-grid or off-grid solution like micro-wind, coupled with high-efficiency lighting, cooking and refrigeration. Fortunately, one already exists: WindStream. I’m trying to get my friends at the Eleos Foundation to invest in establishing a manufacturing facility in Kenya. This will provide numerous benefits all raveled into one: less poverty, better health and nutrition, and better education (as people can read at night); note that educated people have fewer offspring. Everyone wins.
2) China is building a new coal-fired power plant at the rate of one per week, highlighting the world’s need to reduce and ultimately eliminate this incredibly dirty form of energy. Yet, without a replacement, China (and most of the rest of the world) will simply continue to burn coal; it would be great if it were in short supply, but unfortunately, it’s not. Solar PV and wind seem to be the two best candidates. PV is currently $0.56 per Watt – creating an attractive levelized cost of energy (LCOE) – especially if the issue of intermittency/storage can be addressed cost-effectively. This is a matter of R&D — and it’s coming along very well; companies like Eos Energy Storage have announced breakthrough technology that have the potential to make this extremely affordable. Are there other things in our lives that store energy once the cost of batteries comes down? You bet: electric vehicles. Once this happens, it will mean the rapid phasing out of gasoline, diesel, and the internal combustion engine.
3) We continue to slash and burn the Amazon rainforests at the rate of 1.5 acres per second; in the time you’ll spend reading this post, we will have deforested an area approximately the size of a regulation 18-hole golf course. The driving force here is largely the need for additional pasture land for cows, enabling a growing population to have inexpensive hamburgers. Guess what? If I’m king of the world, hamburgers will be getting a bit more expensive, because I’m putting an end to this deplorable behavior. Here, it is legislation, rather than technology, that is required.
4) Meat production aside, the energy footprint associated with the food we eat is outrageous. The average food item that Americans consume was trucked 1200 miles to reach our grocery stores. Moreover, there are “food deserts” all over the world, where the delivery of food is logistically so expensive and/or dangerous that it simply doesn’t happen. Fortunately, we have an affordable solution to provide organic, locally grown food ready to go into place: Tower Harvest with its breakthrough in bioaeroponics. Again, I foresee a world in which factories spring up, employing thousands of people to build and sell these incredible, elegantly simple devices.
There you go: four ways of hitting the broad side of the barn. I’m really looking forward to my conversation with Dr. Pachauri; it will be interesting to see if he agrees with my theory.
Soil Organic Carbon. Work with and enhance natural processes to capture carbon from the atmosphere.
Solar PV is incredibly cheap, and in Africa and almost all continental locations, wind is very weak and unreliable, yet you promote the Windstream device. There are very few tropical places where wind is a better option than solar.
All four of the solutions that you have proposed ignore the obvious.
Most of the energy we use involves the use or abuse of energy in the form of heat. In the summer we use electricity to cool our buildings, which wastes the electricity and also the heat energy from the equipment (and people) in the building. In some places that heat is stored and put to good use in the winter or else the buildings are cooled using stored winter cold. The technology for doing both is well established, the costs are reasonable and the potential scale of energy conservation is much larger than the potential for yet more generation via Solar PV or Wind power generation.
The problem is that this straightforward solution is not widely employed, and is usually not even discussed in meetings like the one you will be having with Dr. Pachauri. You are obsessed with finding complicated methods for generating more electricity instead of using simple technologies to avoid the need for producing more power.
As above, I have been offering the heating, and hopefully, someday, cooling as well, using solar thermal energy with CVT collectors. It seems lacking much foresight to have only “moved the energy fire out of the cave”, and in some cases not even that, in our long evolution, when the origional source enabling biomass and fossil energy is safely overhead every day. It took Billions of years to store energy forms in the earth’s biosphere and yet we race to destroy it in a blink of evolutionary time. It is little more than blind stupidity.
I think Ron Tolmie has very good points and a cause to start rethinking and repositioning where we are going. The problems the earth faces will never be resolved. A major crisis we have no say in or solution will do it for us. The answers for various problems will come from many that have been given their point in time to contribute. There are things that exist to solve the problems but everything has its time. Perhaps we are at the beginning of that time now. Some people believe the Green movement was to suppress nations setting them back in time for control. History has shown this over time. There will be many great companies that have switched their direction to Green that will be sorry and lost when the right technology or method appears. Time to step back and see the big picture in your backyard and ask for the next person you meet to help you with your dream.
Power plants, specifically coal fired power plants are the single largest source of green house gas emissions at over 25% followed by industrial uses at close to 20% (see http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html) Although this data is circa 2008, its still representative of the relative percentage source for global emissions. Vehicles and forestry uses combined account for about a quarter of all emissions. CO2 accounts for nearly 60% of all green house emissions from all sources. So for the sake of prioritization, focus on power and industry uses. Of these, coal and natural gas power plants should be the principal targets.
Following this priority, independent labs like ours are focusing our efforts on reducing CO2 and heat emissions from fossil fuel power plants and boilers. In our case we recycle waste heat and CO2 to make burnable methane. The result is cleaner burning, more efficient power plants that reduce carbon emissions by as much as 40%.
Technology solutions like those we are developing support what I believe Ron and Bob imply. As Bob says, “perhaps we are at the beginning of that time now”.
Meanwhile, without such solutions, the US EIA recently reported that US CO2 emissions decreased to their lowest levels in the past 20 years..nearly to those levels agreed to in the Koyto protocol. This drop is attributed to the move to natural gas fired power plants and relatively low gas prices for the period. However not all countries can effectively move to natural gas like the US can, so technology based solutions need to arise..as they will do.
Craig, that’s not to say that your listed solutions aren’t important, but in an era of limited resources, prioritize where the greatest reductions in emissions can be found.
I say it is as simple as enforcing the new pollution standards on coal generating stations and putting a $1 (that’s only 1%)barrel tax on oil that then is earmarked for converting to CLEAN renewables.
I know that much (perhaps most) of the CO2 produced by humans is to generate electricity, and I like Concentrated Solar Power with molten salt storage as a grid update solution, but I feel that gains are possible through efficiency and conservation as well. I’m curious to know how much benefit could be realized from converting the standard 110-120V lighting in all our homes to 12V LED lighting. Could the same wiring be used with minimal separation cost, and could the ‘transformer voltage step-down to thermal waste’ issue be avoided by standard voltage battery charging and low voltage feed systems? I’m no electrical engineer, but it seems there has to be some value in low voltage lighting somehow. Perhaps distributed solar and wind to battery storage could see low voltage lighting as a partnered application.