I’m unsure if it belongs here or in the Loresraat…
The Power to Change the Future is in Your Hands
So we have an energy crisis. This is not new, nor is it news to most of us, who have been watching our utility and gas bills rise while we hear ever more dire warnings about climate change. If you'd been paying attention in 1974, you would have heard the same warnings, although a bit less stridently, and felt the same stresses, perhaps a bit more keenly. Now leaving aside the perennial mideast and Russian foreign policy threats that also remind me of the 70s, at least until my future rants get there, we can actually solve the energy crisis so that 35 years from now we don't have to read this rant again from some other angry dude.
First, we have to have cheaper energy. Second, we have to have cleaner energy. Third, we have to have more abundant energy. And last, we have to use it more efficiently. To some, this is putting the cart before the horse. We should conserve first, drill second, cleanup later, and pay more all along the way. Sorry, we've tried that and we still have the same basic problems, only more so for our not having fixed them earlier.
1. Cheap Energy.
Cheaper energy can be seen as having two components: production and consumption. Alternatively, one can analyze energy economies along a temporo-spatial axis. Together these dimensions form a simple matrix that can be used as boundary conditions for optimizing the state of the energy economy. Production is currently centralized and based on complex, vast trade and distribution networks, underlain by a market that operates globally and nearly-instantaneously. Consumption is local and driven more by need than by price considerations: technically, energy demand is very inelastic. Production tends to require huge up-front capital investments, political chicanery, and the tacit or open permission of local officials to continue operating by transferring cost and risk to local populations, whether fossil-fuel or nuclear-based. Consumption favors the opposite: simplistic solutions that minimize capital and maximize perceived benefit while transferring costs from the individual consumer to the commons. Neither are acceptable.
What is needed instead is a micro/local solution for production, storage, distribution, marketing, and consumption that allows each consumer to determine what fraction of capital outlay is best for him or her and transfers as little risk and cost as possible. Each person, in effect, owns a share of the grid, and is fully empowered and informed by the market; each consumer is also a producer, and the market is flexible enough to accommodate variability in demand and production on a scale of tens of meters, not hundreds of kilometers. This can be achieved with a one-time effort to incorporate solar, wind, and biomass generation into the infrastructure of every household and business. It would also require a kind of meter-auctioning system through which price changes every 10 seconds to reflect excess capacity and demand throughout the whole network, with a premium granted to the closer producer-consumer-transfers. Drawbacks include the loss of efficiencies of scale currently derived from high-voltage high-tension lines and giant power stations, along with the large profits currently derived by all players in the current delivery system. Initial startup costs would also be quite high, but payback should still be rapid.
To be specific, solar production capacity of 10kw per acre for residential areas and 100kw per acre for business districts should be simple to achieve in a place like Florida, for example. Conditioning and metering that power, and storing or blending it with other sources is harder and more expensive, but still doable with current technology. Imagine a fuel cell and smart meter connected to broadband in your garage, with a solar installation of four by ten meters on your roof. With proper installation you will generate a net surplus for every sunny day, and break even over the course of a year, given typical consumption rates and efficiencies.
Now imagine that you are not home during the day, and you sell all the power you can after charging your fuel cell to run for you at night. Your smart meter finds a neighbor that wants to pay 12 cents per kWh for your 100 kWh generated excess that day, and you can do this 100 days a year. Now you've got a $1200 surplus that you can use to buy electricity from a neighbor who runs wind power when the clouds roll in, or at night. You're spending about $100 a month to finance the whole installation, but since your local utility actually owns and services and manages everything for you, you do nothing except sign the papers. The utility collects about 50% less from you than it did before, but gets it back from the government in the form of subsidies, stimulus payments and tax credits. Less production needs means lower pollution and environmental cleanup costs,including those due to insuring against global warming, nuclear accidents, or coal production and utilization damage. Lower demand for oil means less foreign adventuring and a better economy for the USA. And don't forget, we don't have to build any new power plants in your backyard; we can even afford to gradually mothball the old ones. Combined with hyperefficient appliances and housing construction techniques, we can reduce per capita consumption rates by 75% within ten years, without increasing the total energy budget of the nation during that same time frame. This is ALL GOOD. Plus we can put millions of people to work building and installing hundreds of millions of specialized systems all over the country, and still keep the rich in business by providing high-return low-risk investment instruments for those utilities who adopt the plan and get on board quickly.
2. Cleaner Energy.
We can make solar cells but the process does create some highly toxic waste and is in itself very energy intensive. We can say the same about fuel cells. Windpower is noisy and unsightly; it kills birds and it drives some people out of their minds from magnetic fluctuations and infrasound. Nuclear is a waste nightmare: even if you use fast-breeder or travelling-wave technology to minimize waste from the fuel cycle, the parts remain dangerous for decades to come. Fusion is still in the proving stages, although it holds the greatest long-term promise, perhaps for the very reason that we don't know enough about it. But these are the devils we know very little of, first-hand. And each of them is containable precisely because we are building waste and risk management into the design and infrastructure of new plants.
More problematic is the devil we know well: carbon footprints and pollution. Evenif we collected every bit of waste chemical and product and returned it to the production cycle, thermodynamics mandate an end result of mineral ash and carbon dioxide. It requires some kind of bioremediation to recapture these leavings and produce more fuel. Other wise we have to spend even more resources to sequester them, reducing our overall efficiency and driving up total cost and energy consumption even farther. Now zeolites made from mineral ash and heated by exhaust that capture CO2 may seem like a perfect solution, but the fraction of waste removal is low and the additional requirements high. We can't freeze or dissolve enough CO2 or store it underground for long periods in a stable manner. We don't have technology to use it as a resource, except for agriculture.
This is why we need to make huge swamps and forests. Some 30% of available land would need to be adapted to cleanup our wastes and absorb our carbon. It can be done, but it will be quite difficult. Perhaps we can create a food source that accomplishes much of the same thing. Consider the date-palm, which at one time provided a very large variety of resources for Mediterranean cultures. Consider bamboo, a fast-growing woody reed-grass useful for a large range of materials and products. Consider blue-green algae, an ultrafast medium for turning carbohydrates into proteins. Other biotech projects combined with materials science will undoubtedly provide pathways to convert CO2, heat and sunlight into people-chow. Properly managed we can reduce the waste stream to insignifcance, stop global warming from cascading out of control, and yield both food and resources for an ever-growing population, all without raising prices exorbitantly on land, energy, and consumer goods.
3. More Energy.
Face it: even with efficiency and new sources, we will still face scarcity and competition for resources in the realm of energy use. We need to develop fusion and other, even more futuristic sources of energy. Petrochemical technology is likely to continue advancing as quickly as it can, provided the profit motive remains. We have enough known resources of fossil fuels for the anticipated growth in population and per capita consumption rates, across the globe, for possibly the next thousand years, especially if one considers that the pace of finding low-grade resources and developing the technology to exploit them remains undiminished if not increasing. Fission can yield most likely another thousand. What this means, then, is that we do not have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem. Some of us will have cheap and abundant access to energy and some of us will not. The question is, how sustainable is such a path?
If we continue to consume more for less, we will effectively be transferring costs to those who consume less for more. This is done through both capitalism and militarism, as we have seen over the last thirty-five years. What we do not see is the reflexive costs that we bear for these behaviors. Our environment becomes more hazardous and less productive, requiring more effort to achieve the same returns. Our treasury is depleted in foreign conflicts or through trade imbalances, impoverishing our children. We spend more on the momentary whims of fashion and appetite than on prudent provision against an unknown future, then even more on various opiates for the masses who have consumed their way into self-torture. We require de facto slavery through debt-bondage and foreign (effectively indentured) labor in order to maintain our own excesses. We deny education and intervention for the dispossessed and deprived, then declaim that we can't afford enough prisons for the discomfited and depraved. It is clear that more energy is not the solution in the long run. But we will need it in the near term if we are successfully to make the transition to the future.
We need to invest heavily in the production of micro generators, power management systems and trading software. We must employ legions of workers to retrofit aging infrastructure with ultramodern equipment. And we have to re-educate an entire generation on the merits of collective will and sacrifice. This is how we need more energy.
4. Better Efficiency.
Everything you use that directly emits carbon is, as of this moment, obsolete. Your car, barbecue grill, cigarette lighter--everything that burns or heats directly must be converted into a higher efficiency system. You will need to rebuild your home so that no heat can enter or leave without permission, because you will have no air conditioner or heater. You will be buying all new appliances or adapter-sets (call them 'smart-plugs,' if you will) that only run when you can afford it or when they are absolutely necessary. Your wastewater and your garbage are, effective immediately, resources from which you will need to recover whatever can be recovered safely, and recycle that which cannot, leaving only a very miniscule amount of toxics that cane be dealt with by professionals who in turn can use it for a profit. You will be growing your own food, or owning a share of a co-op that does it for you. You'll be eating less meat, and more that is raised sustainably and humanely. You'll be working with less durable materials for some projects, and more durable ones for others, while making sure that nothing that you're replacing gets discarded heedlessly. And yes, unfortunately, you'll be paying more--a lot more--up front for the development costs of this transition. But think of it in the following ways: first, you've actually been receiving freebies for a long, long time because of American prominence and the cheap-oil economy; second, you're reducing the consts your kids are going to have to pay to maintain your lifestyle; and last, you'll end up healthier and safer in the end if we live in a world based on cooperation instead of mutual victimization.
In the end, it sounds all to easy to chant, "Better-cheaper-cleaner-more," and assume that we have solved our problems with a mantra. I might even suggest that I have solved the crisis single-handedly simply by crystallizing my thoughts into a public essay. But I want no credit or reward (a couple million in the bank is all I need, honestly, folks) other than to realize that you agree, or that at least you're thinking along these lines and are willing to entertain these options. Sufficient conscious awareness focused upon this issue will save me the trouble of having to address it again in 2045. I sincerely hope you and I are both there to celebrate.
