For the math wizards out there, one of the most promising areas of research in today’s clean energy sector is the ultracapacitor. This novel battery-like machine is capable of charging and discharging at many times the rate of even the most advanced batteries today, and with the advance of nanomanufacturing and advanced nanomaterials, it is possible that they could even store more energy as well.
Image Source: Energy Information Administration
First, a brief explanation of the concept: an ultracapacitor is an energy storage technology that has been around for a couple of decades, but whose potential has only begun to be realized, let alone exploited. It stores electrical energy, but the idea is very different from a conventional battery: rather than storing the charge as chemical potential energy, charge is captured as it sits along a surface area, usually carbon nanotubes or some other nanomaterial such as crumpled graphene. Since an electron occupies essentially no volume, it is able to lie flat along the surface, and so the greater the interior surface area of the ultracapacitor cell, the more charge is able to be stored. Because the exploitable area is based on two dimensions but is stored inside a body built in three dimensions, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of charge that can be stored in a cell of a given volume; the only limit is a practical one, related to how much accessible surface area we can create using the materials available to us and the amount of energy available to be stored in this way.
Current batteries have higher energy densities than today’s ultracapacitors, but since lithium-ion batteries and other advanced battery chemistries are unable to charge at the power density needed for certain applications such as electric bus service, trams, and advanced high-speed rail systems, ultracaps are already being used to replace batteries for these as well as other energy storage systems such as those in hybrid vehicles. Research being conducted at MIT and Argonne National Laboratory is rapidly improving the materials science behind ultracapacitors, and they could easily play a major role in solving the energy storage dilemma and saving humanity from fossil fuel addiction.
Better manufacturing techniques, improved technological concepts and materials, and economies of scale have the potential to dramatically reduce down the cost and improve the performance of such devices, even by orders of magnitude. They can also be used them to store energy from home-scale solar energy production systems as well as the electric grid, to save up energy for when solar, wind, and wave power are unavailable or for when solid or liquid fuel shortages emerge. Altogether, given the proper level of engineering, ultracapacitors can offer tremendous potential, and they beckon examination from those interested in offering technological aids to help solve humanity’s energy crisis.
OK, so, suppose you’ve got no sunshine, the wind’s not blowing, your battery is blown out, your ultracaps are busted, you’ve got no trashy fuel left to burn, and for some reason even your geothermal flux capacitor is broken, but you still need some energy. What else are we supposed to do?
A lot of people will try and tell you the only way to balance things out is with natural gas. Well, that might not always be the worst idea in the world, but first check thyself, forst you wreck thyself. Should we really be using natural gas as the first option, as so many people seem to be suggesting? Is it really going to help us transition to renewable energy? I find the proposition dubious, as you probably know by now. Moreover, natural gas is too valuable to be wasting trying to replace coal and oil. We might actually need it for those moments when the lights all but go out.
So, what can we do to cut these guys down to a more appropriate size?
Let me give you my thoughts on a big part of the answer.
Hydropower. Like trashpower, it’s one of those things that gets trashed a lot by otherwise well-intentioned environmentalists. Don’t get me wrong: there’s been many an ecosystem that’s been wrecked before being checked by huge dams. But just like with waste-to-energy, with better living through technology, we can not only fix the problems that were making it dirty before, we can also make it a powerful ally in our quest to rid the world of dirty energy. But what do I mean by that exactly?
Hydropower is good for many things, first of which is providing a steady lightening of the load for when your other sources of lightning power won’t fire. Let’s have a quick look at the Netherlands as an example. They know how to do it up proper, when it comes to both liquid and gas (sidebar: they also recycle half their trash, and burn the other half – for energy). First, they know how to save their gas for when the time is right. Compare them to Britain, which Thatcherized its gas industry and is now facing an energy crisis of epic proportions that might be fixable only with a nuclear fix, at least in the short term. I still have faith that they’ll get the offshore wind and wave power figured out, though – they have some of the best resources in the world, once they figure out how to tap into them. The Netherlands, on the other hand, owns the largest gas field in the North Sea, the largest in Europe even, instead of letting it own them via corporate control. The country has long had a penchant for demanding individual sacrifice for the greater good, though not so much that the State sucks all the flavor out of life. They’ve done a good job of conserving it and of actually tapping into the smaller, scattered fields first, so as to save the best for last. Eat your heart out, Bakken Shale and Kochheads everywhere.
Not only that, but they’re actually finding more of it all the time. The good stuff, too – no fracking required. What can I say, the Dutch know how it’s done. Keep burning that eternal flame.
But enough fire for now - let’s get to the water part.
Water, water, everywhere. We’re going to get wet. Lest you think those crazy Dutch were only about the windmills, let me be blunt with you: they know how to roll with the tides as well, and also a little thing about rolling on a river. They may be living in Flatland, but they’ve still got quite a bit of hydropower going on in their own little world too. And monster dams big enough to block out the sun aren’t the only way of doing things either: if you’ve never heard of microhydro, well, it’s time for you to get crackin’ and frackin’ on a little bit of your OWN research. Talk about untapped potential!
That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t something to say about big hydro as well, since sometimes, as she said, you better go big or go home. Just look at what America’s Hat has to offer up, if we can only manage to get some transmission lines past those confounded nimbies. Power to the people, anyone?
Think classic was the only way I could do it? Here’s a little new wave that might be up your alley, and I’m not talking wave power, although that’s great too. Inspect this gadget, and I’m willing to bet you’ll go WOWZERS, or possibly even YAKAWOW!!! The dreaded Dr. Koch has got nothing on this one. I’m talking, of course, about the variable speed water turbine. We’ve been fangling this one for a while, but it’s ready to roll out now. You see, one of the problems that tends to arise is when the water level falls, and the pressure drops out. The solution? Add a turbine that can go at any speed and still pump out juice. Inconsistent generator speed got you down? All it takes is an extra flux capacitor to smooth out the output a little bit. So simple, you can even do it yourself.
Hey, hipster techno fans out there, I got the news: this time, we’re keeping the lights on. Wouldn’t want to miss out on that quadruple rainbow, now, would ya? As for me, I’m always on, even when I’m out cold. Five stars. Heads up. Look out below. Shoot past the moon, reach for the stars. Forget the rivers you thought you knew, try a waterfall instead. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.
This is my diss track. Scrubs, you see, get no love from me. None whatsoever. Not a drop. Not even once. No energy wasted, and once I’m done with this one, the pigeons will be squirming in their borrowed shoes, and no further diss will be necessary.
How many Dicks does it take to frack to the center of the earth and make it pop? Answer: only one, and he used to be the CEO of a little company called Halliburton. These same bad boys who brought you boys back in body bags and $20 canned meals not fit for dog food not only cemented BP’s bad drill job in place to make the history books, but also invented a little process called fracking, you see. Lest you think they were coming along with a brand new ride, as so boldly pronounced by Exxon and their ilk, they invented it in 1947. That was before we even invented the hydrogen bomb. Talk about primitive!
While Republicons and Decepticrats were both dicking around trying to figure out how to make a quick buck for the private stash, the good people of America were paying the true price for their shenanigans: once again, oil in the water, in this case countless millions upon millions of gallons of the freshest stuff instead of fire on the salty seas. Well, what’s a headache and a few bloody noses here and there? A small price to pay for cheap natural gas, right? Well, not so much on that cheap part. ‘Cause it wasn’t just the good Americans who paid that price: I got news for you tea party types, there’s more than one way for a cat to catch a mouse. And by that, I mean there’s more than one way to subsidize drilling: environmental externalities aside, it was the shareholders who were paying that two or three times the price on the futures market for each thousand cubic feet. Fiscal conservatives? Hardly, these guys have a mountain of debt all the way to the Kingdom Come they’ll be sending us all to climb on our own two feet if they have their way.
Speaking of which: did you know these guys want to cut funding for the next-generation energy technologies we need to save our skin? Yes, that’s right, apparently the future is a low hanging fruit to some, and they don’t mind picking it right off the tree before it’s even gotten to its full size, let alone ripened. Apparently, anything that slices even a dollar off the profit margin of Koch Industries is considered bad for America. Well, it’s certainly bad for general motoring, that much we know without a doubt. The conspiracy to which I refer, of course, is the attempt to de-fund the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This would be roughly the equivalent of ending the Space Program at Mercury. We may be abusing plastic like it’s our job, but remember that if it weren’t for public sector investment in science and technology, we’d never have the stuff in the first place, and I don’t just mean trashy bags, but the also what lets me tell you this over the tubes right at this very moment. Let’s hope these boys get caught Red-handed just like the CIA with their friends in the Taliban and left and right, but mostly Right, all over South America. Talk about Forbidden Fruit! (Sidebar: do I even dare mention the extraterrestrials? Nah, save that one for another day. First things first.)
And if that wasn’t enough, they dare not touch those Red State agricultural subsidies either, oh, no sir! When it comes to pretending to be pound-wise, these guys have even the old Reagan, Reagan II, and Reagan III and IV administrations beat! Oh yeah, I went there, and I’ll even go a step further: everyone’s beloved Saint Reagan was even worse than Bush II. Sure, he may have had the gift of gab, but just because a pigeon can cluck doesn’t mean he has anything to say. His vision for America included painting red stripes right over the blue background for the stars, and I don’t mean a smooth brew from Jamaica: we’re talking red and white bottles of high fructose chemical poison processed from the fruits of God’s Green Earth. If only we had the foresight to support real green agriculture, we might be eating a lot more fruits and vegetables, but corporate criminals get first dibs when it comes to government handouts, so it’s not just the price of wheat going up these days, but cabbage and tomatoes too. Shrub, grandchild of the famous friend of fascists, may have taken it to the next level in dropping a cool trillion on fruitless wars in the Mideast, but his ideological predecessor and the source of his worst Dicks and Donnies was the one who set the stage. Reagan invented neoconservatism, and you just can’t top that when it comes to Worst President Ever.
Last, but not least, I’m willing to bet some private waste management contractor has some skin in the game when it comes to the recent dicing of the Green the Capitol initiative. And de-funding the EPA, whose total budget amounts to a mere handful of billions, isn’t exactly the best way to balance the budget. Remember, not every office has its head in the sand like the one that lets the haters keep hating on waste-to-energy so much: these are the folks who make sure our rivers don’t catch on fire and air doesn’t contain enough smoky soot to choke a camel. Next time you need to pull off a balancing act, try using your head instead.
Look at that, I even managed to hit all seven categories, and then some. Eat your heart out, double rainbow, I got sixteen ways ’til Sunday to call out a Scrub and make him run crying back to the hole he came from! Speaking of which, it might be time to return to our ongoing discussion soon. But ah, as the Good Book says (and a little bird or two as well): to everything, there is a season. How I do love Spring!
Are you a math geek? Like solving problems? Needed a quick jolt to knock you into action? This one’s for you.
Say hello to my little friend: he’s gonna pop a cap in you. An ultracap, that is. Never heard of him? You have now.
First, a brief explanation of the concept: an ultracapacitor is an energy storage technology that has been around for a couple of decades, but whose potential has only begun to be realized, let alone exploited. It stores electrical energy, but the idea is very different from a conventional battery: rather than storing the charge as chemical potential energy, charge is captured as it sits along a surface area, usually carbon nanotubes or some other nanomaterial. Since an electron occupies essentially no volume, it is able to lie flat along the surface, and so the greater the interior surface area of the ultracapacitor cell, the more charge is able to be stored. Because the exploitable area is based on two dimensions but is stored inside a body built in three dimensions, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of charge that can be stored in a cell of a given volume; the only limit is a practical one, related to how much accessible surface area we can create using the materials available to us and the amount of energy available to be stored in this way.
OK, so what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that while we were all asleep at the wheel of our electric cars thinking that lithium-ion batteries were the end-all-be-all for electric energy storage and that a concept over two hundred years old (the voltaic pile, or battery) was all we had in our arsenal for the fast-charging and energy-dense storage devices we need to make clean energy sources like solar power viable at the scales and in the applications where we really need them, those whiz kids over at Argonne National Laboratory were busy working with extraterrestrial intelligence to fangle something truly new and exciting.
Currently, ultracapacitors using nanocarbon materials are already in use for fast-charging hybrid and electric buses and a few other applications. But their potential extends far beyond current usage. As usual, better manufacturing techniques, improved technological concepts and materials, and economies of scale will bring down the cost and improve the performance of these devices. I’m talking about fast-charging electric vehicles of all types, capable of storing more than a few dozen miles’ worth of charge. Not only that, but we can use them to store energy from home-scale solar energy production systems as well as the electric grid, to save up energy for when our shining star can’t quite reach us. Skeptics will say the technology isn’t ready yet, but I say it’s just a matter of time – and a little effort. Hey, politicos: instead of slashing energy research budgets like the blind leading the blind, why don’t you think about cutting off the arms of the armed forces instead, and doubling, tripling, or even sextupling the budget for our national labs so they can get this stuff off the bench and onto the market where we need it?
Of course, it won’t solve everything: we still need to conserve our natural resources and ecosystems properly and with respect to the needs of future generations, and we still need to actually develop and build out the clean energy sources we’ll use to charge these things up in the first place. But put all the pieces together, and you begin to see that it can be done. We have the technology, and we can build it.
Think you’ve seen it all? I got news for you: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Have you ever seen the sun? You know, that big shiny ball of fire in the sky? Well, you might want to have a second look.
New wave is great, but today we’re talking old school. There’s something to be said for the perfect fusion of form and function, and in terms of modern technology, such an ideal synthesis is found in the concept of a building or community that is in itself an ecosystem, recycling all its products and generating an output at least equal to its energy intake.
A lot of observers of the energy markets tend to dismiss solar power as too expensive, too variable, and too insignificant to have a real impact on energy consumption. As it happens, they are incorrect on all three counts. Photovoltaics and other solar energy technologies become cheaper every day and have already passed grid parity in many markets, and they will continue to do so as the cost of fossil fuels continues to rise inexorably. The problem of variability in renewable energy sources is easily addressed through complementary technologies from advanced batteries and other energy storage technologies to smart grid management and interconnections. And the scale of solar development has been increasing almost faster than we can even measure it, with total worldwide deployment of PV doubling roughly every two years and with “largest solar array yet conceived” headlines gracing the pages of the daily papers with ever-increasing regularity.
Let’s address each of these concerns with the supposed non-viability of solar power point by point.
“It’s too expensive.”
Not so. The typical cost of solar photovoltaics today, factoring in subsidies, is around $2 per watt, which works out to about $0.20 per kilowatt-hour, depending on your latitude and degree of sunshine. That is already a lot less than some of us pay on our electric bills, and some seven times cheaper than twenty years ago. These costs are only likely to continue to decrease as manufacturing processes become more efficient, as new systems like thin-film PV using nano-scale materials become increasingly popular, as economies of scale are achieved within the solar energy industry, and as the energy return on investment for solar energy continues to increase. It truly is just a matter of time before solar and other renewable energy technologies are cheaper than coal not just here and there, but everywhere. And that’s not even counting all the tax revenue we could be generating by forcing coal burners and deepwater drillers to actually pay for all the pollution and excrement they create for once!
“It’s too variable.”
Not when done right. One square meter of photovoltaics is enough to generate between fifty and one hundred watts of power; a rooftop covered with solar panels is enough to generate many times over the amount of energy used by a well-designed building filled with efficient appliances. It’s really just a matter of storing that extra energy, and contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, we already have one or two ways of doing that. Not only that, but I’m pretty much convinced that ultracapacitors are going to be the wave of the future, not just for their current uses for fast-charging hybrid buses but for home-scale and grid-scale energy storage as well. These machines, which require an additional post on their own to truly describe their potential, store electric charge along a surface rather than as chemical potential energy as in a battery. Imagine how much surface area you can pack into a volume of a given size, combined with the potential of nanotechnology, and you may begin to see things as I do. And let’s not forget that there ARE, in fact, base-loading and on-demand renewables as well, like geothermal and waste-to-energy, that can serve us well to provide backup power when the lights go out in the sky.
“It doesn’t scale.”
Nothing scales better. Indeed, solar energy comes in all sizes, from small domestic-scale hot water or hybrid PV systems to mult-gigawatt power plants that disabuse the land of its former disuses. Now, compare that to an alternative that a lot of “techno-fetishists” like to cite as the future: nuclear power. Not only does solar power not cause radioactive releases or the occasional meltdown and reactor explosion to permanently alter all our DNA as well as that of our children and do little to support the nuclear-weapons-industrial complex, it can also scale both up and down as needed. How are we doing on modular nuclear reactors these days, Bill Gates? Any progress yet? And, it almost goes without saying, but unlike certain other ways of getting energy, it won’t blow out a huge hole in your wallet, nor in the ocean floor.
Are you still unconvinced? Well, haters gonna hate, as they say. But I can paint a sharper picture than they can by pointing out that all the deficiencies they love to cite are merely omissions or oversights. Eat your heart out, guys. In the meantime, the rest of us will go ahead and do our best to actually fix the problem.
It’s been a while since I’ve stated the obvious, but it still needs stating for the oblivious. If you’re looking for hope for humanity in the face of such daunting challenges as peak oil, the steady obliteration of our natural resource base, and the unkiltering of the global climate, look no further.
There are still those poor, pitiable souls out there who believe the highest possible, and even the only possible reuse of a partially rotted-out apple crate is to keep loading it with apples until cows walk down stairs. If you start talking about burning your old smelly couch and actually getting real some use out of it, they start welling up with tears. Don’t worry, it’s not dioxin or sulfuric acid in the eyes causing your small-minded friend to cry. The real problem is that old habits die hard, and when one has been taught by one’s forebears for so long that a practice is wrong, it can be hard to disabuse onesself of such thinking. In this case, so many are willing to continue believing old facts they picked up from their environmental senseis, including many of the founders of the environmental justice movements whose only real fault is unwillingness to consider newer and better evidence. And to be fair, the fault lies just as equally with the purveyors of our miracle technology, for their own failure to confront the PR disaster of an industry’s history. The problem with such longstanding adherence to old beliefs is that even the old master must die eventually; there’s a reason only a Sith has the power to live forever (and his own actions will eventually undo him anyway). As times change, so must ideas.
They say the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. It’s true in a sense: the very best of what we are able to do with advanced networks of machines is paralleled in nature to the circuitry of a multicellular organism or even an ecosystem, with such a degree of complexity and inter-utility that the base components of the machine on their own could never be used to predict the ultimate outcome of the total system. To the untrained eye, it truly is magic.
Consider for a moment the waste-to-energy plant.
This modern marvel can turn your trash into mere ash, burn away the remnants of rotting pulp from that smelly couch or funked-up mattress so nobody has to blow out their wrist going at it with a box cutter, spring the springs back out of your couch and the nails out of your old crates and pallets with magnets, in the process add value to old fossil fuels so we don’t have to frack everything up so much and blow up so many mountains, and maybe even pop out few rock solid pellets of aluminum and yes, even gold and silver in the process. And, on top of that, it has none of the variability of most other renewable sources of electricty, with slight variations to the process (and a few precautions) can turn the used product into chemicals or fuels instead of heat if that happens to be more valuable at a particular place in time, and even does so at a cheaper cost than most renewables as well. Why on God’s Green Earth would you ever want to bury this stuff?
Not only that, but if you really like, you can also turn your work of engineering into an art piece. Personally, I think there’s something to be said for simplicity as well: a nice solid functional item that works exactly as it should and blends in perfectly with its surroundings. But if you want to get all wild and wacky with it, that’s alright with me too. Either way, let’s let this magic genie out of its bottle already, for crying out loud!
“Oh, hey down there little guy…whatcha lookin’ at? Just a-rockin’ and a-cruisin’ up here.”
You’ve probably been taught that the “invisible hand” of a “free market” is the most “efficient” way of generating the largest amount of wealth for the largest number of people, and that those who don’t participate in the system are “lazy welfare queens.” It would be best if you disabused yourself of these notions.
I’ll repeat here a thought experiment I’ve mentioned to a number of people over the last day or two: imagine a world in which all labor is automated (and note that you don’t have to get all the way there for the conclusions of the experiment to hold true). The requirement for less intensive human labor should, in theory, ease the burden on everyone. But under a system of dog-eat-dog capitalism, where all wealth must be considered “earned” through engagement in the labor market, and where virtually all jobs are eliminated by ever-increasing automation, the only ones who stand to gain are the oligarchs who own the machines, pulling the strings at the top. The entire economy would reorient itself to serve only the needs of those elites. Do you suppose we might be headed in this general direction? And if so, should we continue full speed ahead? Or should we at the very least pause and consider what the purpose of employment really is, whether it is an end in itself or simply a means to an actual end, that of improved general welfare at the median of society?
Consider this one: if you want economic stimulus through job creation, the most effective way to do so might be something like this:
WASHINGTON—In an effort to boost the economy and promote job growth, representatives from the newly revived Works Progress Administration announced Thursday their plan to dismantle, piece by piece, the 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete forming the Hoover Dam, and then immediately rebuild it. “This is a vital initiative,” said WPA director Ted Doogan, who was appointed last week. “Systematically tearing down such a massive edifice will create at least 25,000 jobs over the next five years. And then reassembling it, using all the same pieces in the exact same configuration, will employ another 25,000 workers. America is back.” Other public works projects currently underway include the bulldozing of libraries, the burning of national forests, and the defacing of public murals, which will be followed by a massive plan to rebuild libraries, revive national forests, and repaint public murals.
Efficiency at its finest, no?
If you happen to be among the lucky ones whose work hasn’t yet been outsourced, automated, or otherwise eliminated, if you are among those who would object to the idea of providing a guaranteed minimum livable income to all citizens, you might ask yourself a few questions: could a robot do your job? How about someone in Bangladesh? Does your work really require any “skills” outside of formatting Excel spreadsheets and keeping an Outlook inbox neat and tidy? Do you have to work with your hands? When was the last time you had to use any aspect of your “higher” education? Is there any creativity or artistry involved on a day-to-day basis? How many times per week, or even per day, do you find yourself unable to engage in the activities from which you truly derive some pleasure or passion because you must instead act in a way that serves a corporate interest that does not concern you directly? And finally, does your work create any real, lasting wealth, or are you one of the multitudes involved in transforming fossil fuels into garbage?
Now, let’s step back for just a moment. I don’t mean to suggest that all jobs are worthless, or that the idea that anyone who does one deserves no more wealth than someone who does literally nothing except sit on the couch watching reruns of Family Guy. I do mean to suggest, however, that such a person in many cases creates the same aggregate value as someone who works day in and day out, and in some cases more value (considering the number of business models predicated on the creation of negative value and the outsourcing of unpaid externalities). And considering any of the above criteria, can you really honestly say to yourself that someone not engaged in this activity does not have the right to a decent standard of living? What about those who are entirely able and willing to contribute to the creation of value for society in some way, but whose entreaties to do so are rejected by the ruthless inefficiencies of the corporate economy? Do they deserve hot meals? Is it really a better economic model to force someone to “earn” her keep serving poison to the masses at Burger King than to simply pay her to stay at home doing nothing?
Oh, whoops, this one is proprietary! Another great example of how large corporations create positive wealth for society at large, no? Ah, well, at least you can still watch it on YouTube…
Let’s return briefly to the idea of negative externalities, and how much of our economic system is oriented around encouraging people to take jobs that promote them, at the expense of the public’s general welfare. Externalities are a lot more important than most economists assume. In many cases, they are the very heart of the matter, the basic reason why one choice is better or worse than another (and remember, kids: economics is about making good choices, not just about maximizing profit for the corporation). Most economic analysis either ignores externalities entirely or at the very most treats them as some kind of side consideration, perhaps shifting around some prices but too difficult to bother including in any economic model. But consider the following claim, some variation of which we’ve seen from a number of related vested interests:
“Continuing to burn coal creates more jobs than solar or wind power because it maintains the need for coal miners.”
And why is it that the dirtiest fuel creates this particular economic “benefit”? Precisely because it requires continual depletion of a non-renewable resource! Now, you try and tell me there is any real value in maintaining these jobs for their own sake. So we don’t even need to consider how our present economic system treats any of the other externalities of coal burning, and there are many, all of which “add” value to the economy in the form of jobs (in the health care and environmental remediation sectors) and an increase in the GDP through their management, to the extent that they are managed. Just the very nature of the activity is, in itself, a negative externality to society as a whole: it permanently destroys a resource for all time, making the next round of coal that much harder to find and burn. And there are still those out there who believe the game we’re playing isn’t rigged to make bad choices?
Now how about this one: Michael Vick. The man gets paid bajillions. What value has he created? He has tortured dogs, but even setting aside that negative value, let’s consider just what it is that he does that enables him to “earn” his keep: he’s good at tossing around a dead pig. What value does that create? Well, for one thing, it inspires many television viewers to get piss-drunk and gorge themselves on nachos while living vicariously through a machismo colloseum spectacle. What a great example for the children! And another type of value he creates: by getting more people to tune in through his display of athletic prowess, he creates lots of revenue for advertisers. You know, those corporate parasites who make their living by turning the very premise of free-market capitalism on its head: convincing people to buy products that won’t benefit them through misrepresentation and manipulation in lieu of the “information” that is supposed to be the greatest asset to the perfectly rational economic human consumer.
The list goes on. Ke$ha. Charles Koch. Lloyd Blankfein. T. Boone Pickens. R.J. Reynolds. Coca-Cola. The entire prison industry. All of them, making fortunes by taking advantage of unpaid externalities that vastly outweigh any positive benefit to society. For every instance you can find of a millionaire or billionaire who has transformed civilization for the better, I can come up with ten examples of those who make their fortunes by turning fossil fuels into garbage. At some point, we have to ask ourselves: where does it all end?
Real Wealth? It’s Gone Daddy Gone…
I’ll go ahead and end this one on a positive note: you only live once, so stop worrying about it and go do something you really enjoy! I myself am going to go make some art, and create something of real value.
Freedom isn’t free, at least not freedom from imported oil dependence. Someone has to pay for the alternatives. But whom?
The answer, if we base our decisions about which alternatives to pursue on incomplete information, without understanding their true costs and long-term impacts, is that all of us will pay the price. And that’s exactly what the profiteers had in mind, which is why, even today, the members of America’s Natural Gas Alliance have done little to correct the media myths about what is really cheap and what is really expensive. Quite to the contrary, producers continue to purchase ad space on the front page of the New York Times, repeating the story that “technological advances” have suddenly made ninety years of gas available, thereby allowing utilities, policymakers, and the public at large to indefinitely put off the more difficult work of finding resources that won’t run out and irreparably damage the planet’s life and ecosystems. They know full well that energy transitions take time, and that it is impossible to respond immediately to volatility in the market by bringing new projects online – just look at the time it has taken to get the Cape Wind project off the ground. If we choose to increase our dependence on natural gas today, we are stuck with that decision tomorrow, even if the costs rise dramatically – and we won’t have built out the capacity needed to manufacture replacements. The conventional wisdom is that abundant gas is pricing the real alternative, renewable energy, out of the market. “Energy in Depth,” indeed: if we get in so deep, where exactly does the “transition” part come into play?
What gets less attention than the (artificially) low price is that all that technology doesn’t come cheap. The real winners in the horizontal drilling and fracking boom aren’t the gas producers like XTO, Chesapeake, and Range Resources, which helps to explain why these gas-leveraged companies keep selling off acres to companies with deeper pockets like Exxon, Chevron, and CNOOC. The real winners are the oilfield services providers: companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger who hold the intellectual property rights, equipment and expertise required to coerce oil and gas from difficult-and-expensive-to-develop shales. Counterintuitively, the larger base of reserves potentially available in shale and other low-grade resources, like bituminous sands and ultra-deepwater oil, doesn’t really help to alleviate scarcity because the higher costs of technology required to develop those resources must ultimately be passed on to the consumer at large. As resource economist Peter Odell put it, you don’t run out of resources, you run into them. Unfortunately, thanks to the PR blitz from the fossil fuels industry, it’s taken the mass media a while to make the connection between rising costs to producers and rising costs to consumers. So we are stuck with the myth of cheap and abundant natural gas, the supposed “alternative to fossil fuels” that is, in fact, a fossil fuel itself.
Can you connect the dots?
If you follow the statements made by executives of major gas producing companies, you’ll notice that lately, the narrative has changed a bit. No longer is anyone under the illusion that natural gas is a low-cost panacea; instead, they emphasize an ongoing transition to “liquids-rich plays,” like the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. The idea here is that, even though heavily gas-leveraged companies know they cannot recover the costs of development at today’s prices, perhaps some of that cost can be offset by drilling for oil instead, given the higher price for the commodity.
So how has that transition from shale gas to shale oil been working out? As it turns out, not so hot. Producers are fast discovering what they should have already known: the price of oil is high for a reason, and producing it is not as simple as just poking holes in the ground. The easy oil is gone, and you can’t offset the cost of producing expensive gas by simply shifting production to expensive oil instead. So once the attempt to displace costs to another profit center, in the form of difficult and expensive oil, fails, to whom does the hot potato of high production costs get passed next? The answer, as noted above, is quite clear at this point. Sooner or later, we will all pay the price for our poor judgment.
It’s just a matter of time before all this blows up in our faces.
Does a Nissan Leaf or a GM Volt really use considerably less energy than a comparable conventional compact or midsize sedan? Could the same reasoning given for seductive ”100+ mpg” and “Zero Emissions” stickers be used for more insidious purposes? With the first shipment of 2011 model electric passenger vehicles ready to hit the streets and plug-in hype at an all-time high, it’s worth considering the implications of the EV methodology from the EPA (no, not the Electric Plug-in Association) and all its faults for another measure used to compare energy options: the energy return on investment (EROI) of primary fuels. In fact, the same rationale used to justify head-scratching mileage ratings is used in a misleading context to make sources of renewable energy, such as the sun, appear less attractive in terms of energy return than conventional dirty coal and oil.
The biggest problem with 100+ mpg ratings for vehicles of the plug-in type is that primary fuels, or slightly refined derivatives thereof, are compared directly to units of electricity. It should be noted that electricity does not simply come out of the ground as do coal or oil; it is a highly refined and nearly universal energy carrier whose versatility gives it far greater utility to society than raw fuel with its limited direct uses. But according to the methodology of EPA, “a BTU is a BTU,” and units of electrical energy can be compared directly to the energy content of primary fuels such as gasoline and diesel fuel. This is rather like comparing oranges to orange juice. The high apparent efficiency of electric vehicles derives from the actual inefficiency in converting thermal energy to usable electric or motive energy (and in fact the conversion between these two forms is also close to 100% efficient). If you want to know how many “gasoline gallon equivalents” any vehicle is actually using, simply multiply the given mileage using the EPA method by the conversion efficiency of the power plant used to generate its motive power. In the case of a conventional vehicle, the power plant sits under the hood. In the case of the typical U.S. grid mix, the power plant sits on somebody else’s backyard and is usually around 33% efficient. So your 120 “mpg” EV actually gets, all told, around 40 miles per “gallon-equivalent” of its primary fuel, assuming you charge it from the grid. Not too shabby, but 40 is not the same as 120.
Similarly, when considering the EROI of primary energy sources used to generate electricity as a secondary carrier, one often encounters analyses that limit the study of coal, for instance, to the EROI at the mine-mouth. But an EROI of 80:1 for simply getting rocks out of the ground does not give us much useful information to compare to potential alternatives. Even if all electric power were generated directly at the mine-mouth (and we know that is not the case), we would still need to know the energy losses associated with conversion to electricity. Converting thermal energy from a coal fire in turn to steam, to the mechanical energy of a rotating turbine, and finally to the energy carried by electrical currents induced in a power plant’s connection to the grid, introduces losses, mostly in the form of waste heat, at each step. So if the EROI for the thermal energy content of mine-mouth coal is 80, then the EROI for mine-mouth-coal-generated electricity is roughly a third of that figure, or around 27:1, based on the conversion efficiency of typical power plants.
Comparable figures to primary fuel EROI for most renewable energy sources makes little sense – the primary energy converted into electricity, e.g. sunlight or wind, is free, in both monetary and energy terms. Instead, the ultimate EROI of wind- or PV-generated electricity is used as the basis for comparison, usually yielding relatively lower figures such as 8:1 for photovoltaics or 19:1 for wind power. While we may also charge certain support infrastructure, such as long-distance transmission or energy storage, as additional energy costs unique to renewable energy in determining EROI, these considerations are no different from assessing the energy costs of networks of pipelines and railroads needed to support fossil fuel consumption, and such costs are (in the case of renewables) of far lower magnitude than the 60-70% losses of primary energy associated with thermal power plants. And while 8:1 or 19:1 may still be lower than 27:1 (which should be an upper bound for the EROI of coal-fired electricity, given that any transportation beyond the mine-mouth will lower the ultimate EROI), these numbers are also a far cry from the 80:1 figures that make renewable technologies appear ridiculous by comparison.
Hopefully it is clear that my goal here is not to disparage the EV but to promote a clearer understanding of how to compare apples to apples. And heck, the EV is better than nothing – we’ve known petroleum was unsustainable for about as long as we’ve been using it to carry around ourselves and our stuff, and what could be better evidence than the daily transfer of over $1 billion in wealth every day from Americans to petroleum exporting nations thanks to our gas-guzzling habits? It is undoubtedly a good thing that automakers have had the foresight to put into production advanced models that can convert different forms of energy into propulsion power and conserve energy that would otherwise be wasted in transit. But we cannot act as if the EV, should it prove a viable replacement for a major share of transportation, gives us a blank check to continue our happily motoring culture and all its trappings of luxury without considering the physical limitations of the biosphere and humanity’s existence within the larger ecosystems on which it depends.
Case in point: what we call primary fuels are, in fact, secondary products of the bounty of sunlight harvested over eons by the Earth’s organisms. Solar energy remains the only primary energy source directly driving the vast majority of life processes, and as a consequence the replenishment of fuels on which we depend is fixed at a certain rate given the biophysical conditions under which minable fossil fuels deposits can form. Fossil fuels may have given us the temporary illusion of freedom from Earth’s primary productivity, but the overall energy balance equation hasn’t changed much over billions of years. When one considers ancient photosynthetic and geologic conditions as input requirements, and the impossibility of recreating those conditions on timescales meaningful to humans, the long-term EROI of fossil fuels really doesn’t look so good.
It was suggested by a friend that I share this handy reference chart with the Internet at large. Keep in mind the numbers here are simply rough estimates and should be adjusted for inflation, but hopefully it gets the point across. There’s been a lot of chatter about the “clean coal” concept lately, and, predictably, the industry has been advertising that “it works.” Unfortunately, now that the technology has cleared the lowest possible hurdle and moved up to the same level of credibility as plasma gasification and algal biodiesel, it’s the same old story again: no amount of money can buy it any more love. Anyway, if old king coal can live up to its reputation for affordability, we might start thinking about adding it to the list of contenders. Until this time, any additional promotional materials will be treated as such.
