We Need An Energy Policy
A friend sent me this story about his local (Philadelphia) region: “Offshore Wind Farm Rejected in New Jersey.” Rightfully, he’s dismayed.
The analysis here shows how flawed our whole approach is to providing energy to businesses and consumers. The whole thing needs to be ripped out by the roots, and replaced by an energy policy at the federal level (we have none at all now) that points in the direction we as a nation want to take, and contains a few main tenets:
• Utilities need to phase out fossil fuels over the coming decades; the first priority here is decommissioning coal-fired power plants. In particular, we should be providing incentives that will encourage utilities to generate power from no-carbon resources (especially renewables), and implement smart-grid, energy storage, high-voltage transmission over large distances, and integration of the three major grids in the U.S.
• Municipalities need to have incentives to reduce the energy impact on transportation: more/better mass transit, encouraging fewer vehicle miles driven. They should also be encouraged to implement “smart cities,” which is itself multi-faceted (the link takes you to a webinar on the subject).
• At the “load” (energy consumer) level, we need to provide incentives that will encourage conservation, efficiency, distributed generation, and electric transportation. The new approach needs to deal with the “death spiral” facing utilities, where consumers leave the grid, driving up the costs for the remaining utility customers, encouraging even more consumers to leave the grid.
All of this can and should be revenue-neutral. We have every right to create a level playing field that will make all this happen naturally, taxing behavior that has a deleterious effect on the environment, and rewarding behavior that takes us in the direction of sustainability. It’s really not rocket-science, and I really don’t think it’s all that controversial. Does anyone who studies the subject even superficially really believe we can carry on indefinitely with the status quo?
In fact, I’m hoping the phone rings right now and U.S. Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz (pictured above) tells me he wants me to come to Washington to help him make all this happen — but I’m not holding my breath.
Craig: As I see it, this web of different interests has come to the point where, either the change is made intelligently or we will see a revolution, and not a technological revolution, a social revolution of the type of the one’s we are witnessing in the middle east.
How is it that a few people can crunch the rest of the world at their will? And I don’t mean only in the US; the whole world is being ensalved by a few people, some politicians, some “business people” (if you can call them that), what has happened? The governments are supposed to “represent” our interests, and THEY WORK FOR US!!, how is it that we can’t fire them if they don’t comply with the laws of the country? (even the most basic one’s).
If we meditate over this whole situation, we are all being enslaved by the banks, the credit card companies, the power companies (and the fuel companies), the governments are now employees of them. If something isn’t done soon, we will see some important changes.
Yes, we need an energy policy, a tax policy, a new set of work contracts for burocrats. Maybe then we will see a new light and can work in the same direction.
Ah, politics…
We need to re-develop the most abundant source of baseload electricity generation so that we can begin with the transition to non-fossil fueled cars, and of course, so we can finally stop burning coal and other hydrocarbons.
Renewable energy, unfortunately “requires” about 70% fossil fuels for back up (but I’m all for rooftop PV and wind if it’s cheap, knowing that it’s just a supplement with the rather grand potential of powering 30% of any population!).
CSP is the only one with the potential to COMPLETELY power a 10 billion person planetary civilization at deserved high standards, however, it is quite pricey compared to the only other potential source capable of powering 10 billion people without emitting Excess CO2 (or covering many thousands of square miles of deserts). It also would have to cover close to 2% of Earth’s entire land space (if it was the only source for 10 billion people).
http://physics.kenyon.edu/people/sullivan/PHYS102/PHYS102F12Lecture15.pdf
Concerning nuclear, we need to develop and scale up ONLY meltdown proof reactors to the global level… There are closed cycle, molten fuels types and I suppose, there are even the once through (VERY MUCH MORE wasteful) types that are safer than the light water reactor. Regardless of the up to 200x efficiency differences of all the various different reactor designs, ANYTHING (safer than the LWR) beats fossil fueled depletion into an overheated biosphere!
We need to become activists for this kind of (whatever is best) nuclear (there are already enough renewable energy activists).
One of the larger impediments to renewables being viewed as a complete replacement for fossils, as you and Craig mentioned, is storage. Here is a Gates Foundation-backed company about to roll out a battery storage product that is relatively inexpensive, sustainable and environmentally-friendly. http://www.aquionenergy.com/ This company will be joined by many others in the coming years and the technology will continue to improve. If we really embraced innovation and change in this space, our transition to renewables could be swift.
I like the enthusiasm. Just when I was about to give up on renewable energy (and its almost mandatory 70% requirement of fossils). But my negative side says “won’t amount to much” ’cause the Chinese will get it and make sure the price stays high.
In Canada we are already producing enough electricity from GHG-free sources to meet our power needs for decades to come if only we used storage to flatten the loads. The following link shows how that could be done:
http://kanata-forum.ca/storage-technologies.pdf
As it happens we also have working examples of storage systems that demonstrate the principles, using all four of the natural energy sources that can be employed:
* the air is used for the house example and for the system that cools downtown Toronto
* UOIT has a large store that uses AC waste heat for winter heating at a university
* there are many examples of systems that use ground heat (GSHP’s)
* Drake Landing uses stored solar heat to heat a community
Most of these examples need a few design refinements but they illustrate the feasibility of achieving energy storage on a large scale, both for electricity and for heat.
The core problem in both the US and Canada is that most people are so besotted with the idea of generating yet more electricity that they have lost sight of the fact that we primarily use energy in its thermal form, not in the form of electricity, and that it is those thermal applications that are responsible for most of the GHG. A dual function system like an exergy store solves both problems at the same time.
We really DO need more electricity, if we are to ever save the biosphere. We need electric cars and we also need a baseload source like closed cycle nuclear and or CSP. Unless we REALLY mass produce the type of batteries mentioned ABOVE and REALLY machine mass produce the best wind and solar for the money.
Although we need to use passive solar siting and conserve, can’t power the globe with conservation alone. Because, if there is more than 10% fossil fueled back up required, we’re still headed for trouble!
At the present time the cost of battery storage is 1000 times greater than that of exergy stores. Do you really think that we should ignore exergy storage because at some point in the distant future we might all be driving electric cars?
No, we need to do EVERYTHING necessary to completely STOP excess CO2 emissions!
IMO, we are left with a singular political choice to sustainable initiatives. That being the Green Party. The two party system has become a contrived flop. Denial meets deferral. Both sides sucking all available GDP for themselves and their members’ personal gain. Many left wing die hards still say a third party choice is a net depleting option, but I ask you- depleting from what? Choose between “we can’t do it” and “we must study it” parties? So many RE adaptations have been established, and working well, my own included, but they seem to mean nothing to a society struggling to sort the chaff from the buckwheat, and having little spare cash to experiment with, like our former economy seemed to provide. Sure, their were spoilers and failures, they’re still there, but more things were attempted at least, and many were learned from while some ideas worked well in certain situations. All the spare change is being extracted from the former great society.
…….Bottom line seems to be that since “govt is force”, and is using that force to compress and compete with those it’s purpose is to represent, their can be no net growth or gain. It would seem simple to deduce that further wealth extraction only delays an inevitable demise. But yet, the choice for resurrection is where it always was and is, still. A nation unwilling to invest in its common people has made many wrong choices, and may be staring into the black hole of egos net promise.
It looks like we keep on knocking our heads against the wall. We know the physics, we know the economics, we know the problems, we experience the climate damage and it’s consecuenes. It’s frustrating to know about all these possibilities and not being able to do enough to change the course of our future; the road we are on is not the road we should be taking, we can’t be philosophical anymore, time is really running out.
Einstein once said we should work to be of value (to leave more than we take from society) not men of success (where we measure success by how much we take from society); once we understand this, we can’t accept anything more.