If Bloggers Were REALLY Crude, We Could Refine Them and Burn Them
(posted by Jim Henley)
At CNet’s Green Tech blog, Michael Kanellos clarifies the scope of the problem of replacing fossil fuels:
4.2 billion.
That’s how many rooftops you’d have to cover with solar panels to displace a cubic mile of oil (CMO), a measure of energy consumption, according to Ripudaman Malhotra, who oversees research on fossil fuels at SRI International. The electricity captured in those hypothetical solar panels in a year (2.1 megawatts each) would roughly equal the energy in a CMO. The world consumes a little over 1 CMO of oil a year right now and about 3 CMOs of energy from all sources.
Put another way, we’d need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO’s worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We’re nowhere close to that pace.
But don’t blame the solar industry. You’d also have to erect a 900-megawatt nuclear power plant every week for 50 years to get enough plants (2,500) to produce the same energy in a year to equal a CMO. Wind power? You need 3 million for a CMO, or 1,200 a week planted in the ground over the next 50 years. Demand for power also continues to escalate with economic development in the emerging world.
It’s sobering and even useful. It seems, though, that if you do a lot of different stuff you don’t have to build as many of any one thing. Also, I’m not sure I buy this:
The minuscule size of renewables, unfortunately, also means progress will come slowly.
Does it really? Or could it turn out that something becomes very viable to roll out quickly once technical problems get solved and the economics make sense. For instance, I could easily see the worldwide construction industry equipping a lot more than 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels. In a slump year, the US construction industry alone will put up almost a million new houses. That doesn’t count commercial buildings in the United States, new roofing on existing buildings or anything in our imperial dependencies, aka the rest of the planet. Once “we” - the Market; the Gummint; the NAFTA Superhighway Commission; BP Solar’s Capitol Hill Hookers and Blow Office; whoever - decide that solar roofs make mass-market sense, why won’t you see millions of photovoltaic roofs going up globally every year?
It seems like you could scale wind farms up pretty quickly too once you were convinced you had financially viable solutions to the storage and transmission problems. Needless to say, “financially viable solutions” could be anything from private tech solutions to successful rent-seeking.
So, what does anyone with actual expertise think?
Via Five Cent Nickel. See also: Joyner.
April 26th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I can’t claim any special expertise, since I’m not an engineer and don’t even play one on TV. But one thing I’m fairly good at is judging the experts by how they frame the question itself, and whether they accurately state the issues in contention.
The implicit assumption in Kanellos’ argument is that it is *necessary* to “replace” fossil fuels with alternative energy sources on a one-to-one basis. This, in turn, is based on a more fundamental (and equally implicit) assumption: that net demand for energy is simply a given or a fact of nature, rather than itself being a dependent variable.
That reminds me of those “clean coal” industry ads flat-out stating that global demand for energy will increase by umpteen percent by 2030, or some such date. Uh, no. That amount of energy will almost certainly never be produced.
That’s the kind of thing we hear all too much of from the “progressive” side, as well: people who think there’s some magical green fix that will enable this country to consume as much energy as ever, with no CO2 emissions, if we all just buy hybrids and flourescent bulbs.
In making these assumptions, Kanellos dismisses (without ever addressing) the possibility that energy input per unit of consumption can be radically lowered. In fact, America over the last sixty years or so seems to have been part of a deliberate social engineering experiment to see just how *much* energy could possibly be unproductively consumed per unit of consumption. And under the influence of Peak Oil, I expect that experiment to be reversed–only in something closer to twenty years.
The single most important way of “replacing” fossil fuels is to reduce the energy expenditure needed to produce a given standard of living. One aspect of that, obviously, is the industrial and agricultural decentralism hobby horse I’ve already ridden in other threads. Under the influence of Peak Oil, I expect industrial production to be much more localized, and the total energy used for distribution to decline drastically. In addition, as fuel prices drive a large part of the trucking and airline industries out of business, I expect freight and passenger rail to be resurrected as fast as new track can be laid on abandoned rights of way.
By mainstreaming into new building design the kinds of passive heating and cooling technologies described by Lovins in Natural Capitalism, we can reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling by 80%.
Another aspect of the solution is ending the car culture. The way things are now, there are two separate cities for the average person. One of them is the bedroom community where we live, and the other is where we shop and work. Each has its own separate utility infrastructure, and the two are linked by a forty minute SUV commute. As Jim Kunstler points out, this is flat-out coming to an end, whether it happens the hard way or the catastrophic way. Eventually most people are going to live in mixed-use communities where shopping and work are within foot, bike or public transit distance of where they live.
Along the same lines, before the crisis runs its course, I expect telecommuting to realize the potential that was predicted for it in the ’90s. The ten percent or so of the population that could telecommute but aren’t, will actually start doing so, as Peak Oil finally kills the facetime culture. Same thing for all the current business trips that could be handled almost as well by phone or online.
And none of this will require any special government interventions, “green investment,” or subsidies to alternative energy. The price of fuel will make it inevitable. Already it’s been announced that net energy consumption in the U.S. fell in the past year for the first time in decades. The last major reduction in energy consumption was during the crisis of the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s a safe bet we can expect it to continue.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Eventually most people are going to live in mixed-use communities where shopping and work are within foot, bike or public transit distance of where they live.
I already live in such a community. It’s called “London”.
…the building I work in has about (estimating wildly) 600-800 people in it. And four parking spaces. This morning, three of them were empty. The bike racks were full.