Energy transition
The heart of our modern way of life is cheap, abundant energy. This is arguably the largest single factor that separates us from the poverty of our forebears. Cheap, abundant energy is what stets life in modern, developed economies apart from life in developing countries and in third-world basket cases. Most modern economic activity also calls for the cheap, abundant energy to be reliable, ready to go at any moment.
Whether the energy in question takes the form of electricity or the fuels used to power our various personal internal combustion engines, it is the backbone of our civilization, operating at an unfathomable scale. Most of it has to be produced in places relatively far away from where most of us live, work, and play. The energy comes from places we can only imagine. And so we imagine it to come from places that are like the Garden of Eden, which our energy demands are turning into Hell. It’s right next door to where our food comes from.
Thus, when energy becomes more than a magical figment of our imaginations, it becomes a figment of our politics into which we pour a lot of intense emotions about what’s clean and unclean, what’s right and wrong, about Big Forces inflicting unwanted…dirty stuff on…people, places, plants, and animals. In response, someone has invented imaginary energy to fix the problem. Someone has (re)invented magical vehicles for transporting people and goods in a way that doesn’t pollute. These solutions are going to cost us a lot, but they’re worth it, many believe. The problem is too big for us to dally. The time for debating the issues is past. And it won’t be time to do so again until everything’s repaired, later on when the bill comes due, if ever.
What could go wrong?
For one, the proposed solutions of windmills and solar panels, of electric vehicles, all cost quite a bit more than what we have now. They are more expensive for a reason, economics would suggest. They cost more in their production in terms of the resources they consume: generally speaking, any combination of the land, labor, and capital inputs required. The costs are higher, and those costs won’t be paid until the final products are sold on a large enough scale to justify their manufacture. And to this end, government has been enlisted as an original customer for the products—as an original buyer, in some cases directly, and in many other cases by way of heavy price subsidies to make them more appealing to everyday consumers.
This government activity on behalf of products intended as solutions is promoted as essential to preserving or restoring the Garden of Eden. But despite best intentions, it still only hides the problems unique to the proposed solutions. The manufacture and installation of wind farms and solar arrays costs a lot more in natural resource inputs that have to be mined and refined. Their installation requires orders of magnitude more land because the energy they are meant to exploit is dispersed geographically. And the effective life cycle of each solar panel or wind turbine is relatively short in comparison to that of a conventional power plant consuming fossil fuels or refined fissile materials in the case of nuclear. Conventional power plants take up less space than what is required to facilitate harvesting wind or sun energy—by a large factor: If a conventional power plant takes up a square mile, a wind or solar farm capable of producing a similar amount of electricity under ideal conditions would take up ten to 20 times as much space.
Because a modern industrial economy also requires power to be available on demand at all times, power plants that depend on the distributed energy found in wind or sunlight have to be backed up by conventional power plants capable of producing an equal amount of power at a moment’s notice when there is no wind or sun, usually by burning natural gas, because coal, petroleum, and nuclear take much longer lead times to produce electricity. So the wind and solar farms take up lots more land themselves, but also require conventional power plants as a backup: two for the price of, well, more than two—but obscured by government price subsidy.
The magic of the modern power grid in a modern industrial economy is that we don’t see any of these problems, accustomed as we are to electricity being available on demand all our lives, except for a few rare occasions when there’s a power outage, rarely lasting longer than a few minutes or maybe hours. The magic is so convincing that we don’t even think of it as magic. We think of it as the way the world is supposed to work, the way that it always has worked and always will work, no matter what sort of restrictions or limitations we put on it by regulation.
Because wind and solar need more land and more energetic weather, they are not usually located close to where we live in large numbers, meaning the power they generate has to be transported over great distances in large quantities. In turn, this means their sites have to be connected to cities with much more copper wiring in high-voltage lines spanning much greater distances—over which there are losses which have to be made up by even more generating capacity. The energy economy meant to be so much cleaner requires ever more copper to be mined, to name just one input. And putting vehicle power on car batteries increases the demand for that electricity, requiring even more long-distance copper wire. The energy transition will require copper mining on a scale that is some multiple of what we are mining now worldwide.
All of which is on top of the requirements for other minerals to be mined for use in the solar panels and windmills, whose life-spans are only about 30 years each, as opposed to multiple times that for conventional power plants. So in about 20 years after installation, power output from windmills and solar panels begins its decline until the panels and windmills become industrial waste, little of which can be recycled. Because there’s nothing to be gained from their waste, it often stands as permanent industrial ruins in places far away from where people live. Incidentally, this waste stands on vast numbers of concrete piers that remain permanent fixtures of the landscape as well.
But if we set all that and similar problems aside, the energy transition looks quite promising and unbelievably clean. If we set all of that aside, we might persuade ourselves that the magic of conventional energy is much dirtier by virtue of the fact that it was never built on anything as clean as dreams, as innocent as our collective imagination. And if we take the word “if” out of those statements, are there really any limits to what is possible?
The most recent inspiration for this came from a presentation Mark Mills gave to a group of Norwegians recently. It has a lot to say about how all the the magical, far-away stuff works in reality, and why it will cost a lot in its own right.
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In order to calculate energy efficiency, one has to draw a boundary line.
You can get really phenomenal efficiencies if you draw the lines in the right places.