There’s an old saying in biology that poison is dose-dependent, recognizing that everything is poisonous at the right dosage. Drinking a glass of crude oil will make you sick ... but so will drinking 50 gallons of water. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 600 ppm would radically change life as we know it on the earth ... but so would atmospheric oxygen concentrations of 500,000 ppm O2.
This isn’t meant to suggest that all poisons are equal, but simply to recognize that there is nothing so good that it won’t kill you at a high enough concentration. And what is true for chemicals we may ingest is no less true for public policies we may embrace. From police budgets to formal education, what’s good in moderation is problematic in abundance.
And yet when it comes to energy and environmental policy, we continue to presume that our generation is smart enough to know the silver bullets, even while we lambaste our predecessors for failing to comprehend the full scope of the silver bullets of their day.
U.S. energy policy: A history of poisonous silver bullets
A bit of perspective is in order:
- In the late 1800s and early 1900s, New York City labored under a pollution problem with flies, dust-borne diseases, and, what can only be described as massive, anti-lock stink from the abundance of horses, pigs, and sheep roaming the city, coating the streets in manure and urine. The emergence of the automobile was heralded as a wondrous solution to the pollution problem of the day—which it was, and if adopted in smaller numbers, it might not have spawned a pollution problem of its own.
- In the wake of World War II, Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, famously predicted that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter.” Coupled with the Atoms For Peace program, it suggested a world of cheap, abundant nuclear-fuel-making-lemonade out of Hiroshima’s lemons. Today’s waste disposal challenges are yet another symptom of dose-dependent poison.
- As Daniel Yergin outlined in The Prize, our modern oil industry owes much to Winston Churchill and his decision to convert the British Navy from coal to oil to enhance maneuverability—the only problem being that Great Britain didn’t have oil reserves. So he leveraged the U.K.‘s colonial power to extract oil concessions from Mideast emirs and sultans, laying the ground work for what ultimately became BP, Shell, and Royal Dutch ... and Ayatollahs and al Qaedas, once we got the dosage up.
One could go on and on. But it’s worth noting that neither Churchill nor Lewis Strauss nor even the 1880s incarnation of the NYC Sanitation Department were dummies. They simply failed to comprehend that the solutions they sought to the challenges of their day would ever be scaled up to the level where the law of large numbers would magnify their (comparatively) small flaws to create massive social challenges for the next generation.
Who are we to think we know better?
We delude ourselves into thinking that Nifty New Technology will save the day from our own dilemmas, filled with the hubris that we are too clever to repeat past mistakes. Are we really that smart, or are we simply embracing technologies that haven’t gotten big enough to show us their warts?
- The solar industry depends on massive volumes of silicon, which must be mined from quartz and purified of its oxygen with a healthy dose of coal and/or charcoal. Do we comprehend the increased size of quartz mines and (char)coal use to meet a solar-dependent grid?
- Any central power generation technology requires prodigious amounts of copper in the wires, which must be mined and purified, often with significant acid leaching.
- Any battery-intensive future—whether for automotive or electricity storage—is implicitly a world that puts us homo sapiens in much closer contact with large concentrations of heavy metals, from lead to cadmium or lighter metals like lithium.
- Fuel cells require large volumes of rare earth metals (platinum, rhodium, etc.) that tend to be concentrated in parts of the globe not always known for political pleasantry.
This is in no way meant to knock these paths, simply to acknowledge that any technology has nasty side effects in sufficient dosage. To ignore those side effects is to ignore history’s lessons.
What are we to do?
Acknowledging the problem doesn’t necessarily mean that we know the answer, but it is the first step. At a bare minimum, it suggests that we ought to always guide our judgments not by the sex appeal of any given technology, but by its minimization of total demand on finite natural resources. We have to stop framing renewable energy as if it is somehow in competition with efficiency. (And we also ought not to limit our definition of efficiency only to fuel efficiency. Fossil fuels are far from the only finite natural resource we have.)
Conversely, we ought to look very closely at inefficient uses of renewable energy. All resources are ultimately finite, and even if solar energy is effectively infinite, the copper and silicon upon which that resource depends are not. Centrally-located renewables that throw away electricity in line losses and overbuild transmission aren’t responsible energy generators. Neither is it responsible to burn any fuel—renewable or otherwise—without extracting every recoverable Btu out of the stack.
Any environmental policy that doesn’t place resource efficiency at its core promotes environmental tyranny, and it is no more respectful of our grandchildren than our forebear’s embrace of our modern poisons. But we—to a degree our forebears never had—have the lessons of history to guide us. We have that wisdom, and the obligation to use it.
As we go into a massive flurry of environmental and energy legislation come Jan. 20, it bears keeping this wisdom in mind. Chase efficiency. Reward goals, and stop rewarding paths. Be holistic, and rise above the narrow, silo-driven processes that have historically constrained our energy and environmental policies. Our future depends on it.
The hidden costs and benefits of things we take for granted
Comments
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JMG Posted 3:04 am
15 Jan 2009
What has to be at the core, ahead of "resource efficiency" is "recognition of resource limits" and "commitment to global equity." Absent those, the quality of use (efficient/inefficient) is pretty much irrelevant.
I'm wrestling with an increasing fast-rising sense that we are, in fact, not going to do anything serious about climate change, mainly because we're stupid monkeys who see Chinese and Indian people as "other" and we have no intention of saving ourselves if it means letting those "other" monkeys have more shiny fruits and us having fewer of them. That in a nutshell is where we're at: the rich countries are programmed by their lizard brains to want more of everything, period, and then the mammal brain provides enough cleverness to maximize the pile of goodies for "our" tribe at the expense of the others. The thin overlay of human brain is simply not in charge enough of the time to matter.
We've grabbed the shiny fruit at the bottom of the jar, but now we can't pull our paws out of the narrow neck of the jar, and we can't bring ourselves to let go of the prize because we can't overcome our programming that says we have to grab the fruit or else the other monkeys will out compete us. Meanwhile, as we howl and pull and pull and pull, the hunters approach steadily ...
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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Karen Street Posted 3:30 am
15 Jan 2009
He also worked to get Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked, so he was working in a different universe, both numerically and ethically, than just about everyone in the field.
Your point is one I heard from someone in nuclear energy years ago, that many renewables advocates sound like they are saying "too cheap to meter". Many have wind already cheaper than coal, which would mean that Congress could eliminate the wind subsidy, so wind people probably hope no one is listening.
An analysis I saw years ago looked at how much aluminum we would need to go 50% photovoltaic. A report released just before California Public Utility Commission got rid of its electric car requirement showed that the amount of lead introduced into the environment through extra batteries was comparable in health importance to that from leaded gasoline. In China, poor workplace leadership is leading to unhealthy workers on solar panels, big time.
Greater efficiency can also have costs. Improved efficiency helps, up to a point. Almost 1/3 of greenhouse gas reductions in a recent IEA analysis come from efficiency. But at some point, it's easier and cheaper to produce the energy. A clear example is solar power: it is cheaper and less resource dependent if we build solar thermal far away than lots of solar panels for local use. While it may make sense that we save a lot of money on transmission lines and line loss with local PVs, the cost of manufacture, installing in bits and pieces, etc, begins to add up. Additionally, utilities tend to be more effective at maintenance.
Any serious use of wind depends on widespread integration of the grid, and transmitting wind hundreds of miles, along with fossil fuel reserves. The other option is to use fossil fuel reserves in even greater quantities. There is waste in building up the grid, but compare that to the current situation with wind.
I, along with almost everyone else, support subsidies of wind and other technologies today, as an investment in cheaper and greener energy tomorrow. When the subsidies are well over $100/ton, as they are for solar panels, we may be catering to our constituency rather than making good investments--not all subsidies are created equal.
Thanks for the post.
Karen Street
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sunflower Posted 4:14 am
15 Jan 2009
Entropy is as important as efficiency, something your Recycled Energy Development cogeneration successfully capitalizes on.
Solar power for the displacement of natural gas also ignores the low hanging fruit of entropy. Much less toxic is solar heat for the displacement of high entropic natural gas burned for low-grade heat, hot water, soup, and so on.
Renewable energy con artists contribute to lay public cognitive dissonance. Political antagonists amplify this support for the least efficient and most expensive competition knowing full well that they lead the faithful over a cliff you have described here.
Will we spit into this wind? A return to science would be most helpful.
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Gar Lipow Posted 9:07 am
15 Jan 2009
Low temp solar heat is great but we still need renewable electricity.
They are not either or, they are both and.
Burning coal for industrial use, and the using the waste heat to produce electricity still produces unacceptable emissions.
Burning oil or natural gas for industrial use and then using the waste heat to generate electricity still produces unacceptable emissions.
Burning unsustainably harvest biomass for industrial use and then suing the waste heat to generate electricity still produces emissions.
Burning sustainable biomass for industrial use and then using waste heat to produce electricity is low emisison. But right now there is not that much potential for truly sustainable biomass that does not complete with food. "Not much" is a comparison to demand, so if you want to cite tons, list what percent of industrial energy that represents.
Use concentrating solar to provide heat for industrial processes reduces emissions, and even more so if waste heat is used for generating electricity or provide heat for lower temperature needs. But then you really do get into questions of area. Commerical and residential buildings spread their demands out over fairly large areas. Industry uses concentrated power, and I think it unlikely that the roof and parking lot of most existing industrial buildings or campuses will supply most of their demand. You may provide a portion, and that is great, but a majority of industrial energy demand will still need to be supplied by fuel or electricity.
You need to take a whole systems view, to see how things scale.
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sunflower Posted 9:57 am
15 Jan 2009
(More 7 billion square meters solar collectors just for oil displacement just in the US ~ $1 trillion)
Entropy, efficiency, and economics are very important metrics.
Fear not, Gar, all of humanity can be solar energized at costs less than fossil fuels. It is simple math.
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spaceshaper Posted 10:01 am
15 Jan 2009
And if we want to link purpose and economy of resource use in one handy concept, how about 'efficacy'.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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sunflower Posted 10:06 am
15 Jan 2009
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Sean Casten Posted 11:12 am
15 Jan 2009
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:47 pm
15 Jan 2009
I will post more on this, not saying when.
A few last comments: the study on lead exposure assumed no regulations requiring 100% recycling of lead batteries. The same applies to advanced batteries. With requirements for proper recycling (i.e. using safe industrial recovery with proper worker protection rather than just hiring cheap labor to be poisoned) exposure to lead or other toxic materials in batteries does not have to be large.
In terms of resources to build solar panels and transmission and so on, worth noting that concentrated solar thermal uses, as Sunflower says, fewer toxics for low temp heat. But it also uses fewer toxics for high temp heat. And it uses fewer toxics to generate electricity. If Sunflower's thermal mirror technology using smaller lighter mirrors works out, you could focus a lot of them on per large heat engine and get the reliability of large heat engines rather than small. Or someone could follow Sunflower's suggestion in another thread and focus those mirrors on advanced 40 percent efficient heat resistant solar cells, and use the waste heat for hot water and space heating in existing homes. (New homes built to passive standards would not need space heating and in many states would not need air conditioning. Perhaps in those states the waste heat could drive (in addition to water heating) refrigeration. (I suspect a gas refrigerator design could be adapted to run on solar heat - probably would require replacing coils with larger coils to make up for lower temp heat driving it.) Does not solve the problem of baseload, and does not solve the problem of states like Washington where winter is peak, not summer. Short term solar storage does not solve that problem. Now that does not mean solar can't be quite effective in Washington state. But it is a fuel saver, and perhaps helps with secondary peaks, since summer peaks are a substantial percentage of winter ones. Definitely not baseload, and in many States not even peak power. (It is interesting though that New York does peak in the Summer. Probably something to do with extensive use of direct natural gas and (ick) coal heat. Plus predominance of large buildings means waste heat from appliances, lighting and building operation maybe reduces heating load? Or direct gain through windows even in buildings not deliberately designed for passive solar? That would sure boost air conditioning loads in the summer? I'll bet someone on this list knows the answer.)
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:18 pm
15 Jan 2009
Drx replies to me:
Gar I think solar cogeneration and ground source heating/cooling and across the board efficiency improvements in manufacturing (cogeneration) can get 29% at least. From solar cogeneration on roofs producing domestic hot water all the way up to solar furnace cogeneration on factory roofs.
I think wind/wave and ocean current power could be around 20% instead of 10%.
And using natural gas in solid oxide fuel cell turbines for backup is not as bad as regular copal and gas plants. These fuel cells can run on biogas from waste most of the time.
A recent estimate I saw for cow biogas alone claimed that 4.5 million homes could be powered in total. That is without landfill, garbage, food and crop waste, wood waste, and sewage added in.
We are nearly there, ready to phase out nuclear plants over the next 20 years as technologies like superconducting electromagnetic energy storage. And much better cheaper batteries are developed.
I know you are skeptical of smart grid storage potential, but this is developing right now. Studies may just turn up soon on the first smart grid installations.
I'm not skeptical of smart grids doing what most smart grid advocates suggest they can actually do - shift a few hours of demand to reduce the difference between base and peak loads, or take modest advantage of variable supply. To improve power conditioning, and reduce capital for peaking plants. But I don't know anyone involved in smart grid design who thinks they can provide really extensive storage. In terms of cheap batteries, sure if batteries become low priced enough than a smart grid could manage electric cars to shift more power Vehicle-to-Grid advocates currently expect. But if batteries become cheap enough then individuals may buy large home battery storage systems, and utilties may buy their own batteries. Cheap enough batteries and they will be used for utility storage with or without a smart grid. The sweet spot for a smart grid would be $50-$100 per kWh batteries with a 1,200 to 2,000 cycle lifespan. Still expensive enough that utilities would not want to invest extensively, but cheap enough that electric car drivers would probably be willing to lease a fair percent of their capacity. I will point out: does not seem to be anywhere close, and does not solve seasonal problem. Most likely what we will end up with $250 batteries that will last 2,000 cycles. (Actually we have cells close to that now, but the cost of putting them in a battery pack and adding battery management systems drives the price up.) At that price drivers will be willing to sell a small percent of capacity but not much, and you end up with a conventional V2G scenario - where V2G is used for spinning reserve and other occasional uses, but not for anything routine.
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Sean Casten Posted 10:57 pm
15 Jan 2009
I'm with you up until the end of that statement, as there is no path with universally clean inputs. Solar insolation alone, absent an industrial base to make silicon, copper, aluminum, glass, various plastics, etc. is just heat. You need all that other stuff, and making all that other stuff not only consumes finite inputs (copper ore, bauxite, etc.), but also - at least on present technologies - requires fossil inputs to manufacture. Taken very broadly, ore-refining is a reduction process, taking oxidized metals out of the earth and reducing them in the presence of carbon. Maybe someday we can do this with a renewable carbon source, but we can't change the fundamental chemistry. And even then, we are inevitably driven to biomass, where we are again limited by regeneration rates.
Are these uses of depleting resources as significant as the coal that the solar energy replaces as a fuel? No. But therein lies my larger point: if we choose to ignore those risks simply because they seem small today in a world where we haven't yet scaled up the infrastructure, we're simply repeating the mistakes of all who came before. And in all cases, there is no such thing as any global energy infrastructure that requires no inputs of finite materials. Ergo, the only responsible path is to minimize the use of those inputs.
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sunflower Posted 12:12 am
16 Jan 2009
The new numbers, just like the old numbers, indicate that 25% renewable energy and 50% efficiency can reduce civilized energy consumption 75% with existing technologies and with positive returns on investments sans subsidies.
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:32 am
16 Jan 2009
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:39 am
16 Jan 2009
And as Sunflower said you can get very quick inputs for reducing inputs just like you can for increasing outputs. Efficiency is ratio of output to input. It makes sense to pay attention to both numerator and denominator. I will add that there is a group called the Wuppertal Institute focuses a lot on the question of total factor environmental productivity. That is they don't look at just energy, or even primarily energy, but on material intensity, water, mining, land disruption, energy, toxins, greenhouse gases, other pollutants. And efficiency rates high on those scales. And wind and solar thermal rates high on those scales. And battery vehicles rate high on those scales with two caveats - that those vehicles are charged with clean electricity, that material for them is mined with best practices, and that the batteries are recyled with best practices.
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sunflower Posted 3:58 am
16 Jan 2009
Two elements surfaced, green concrete and mirror chemicals. They were concerned that we planned to use glass/silver/palladium/paint. Palladium sounded toxic if not radioactive. Actually it is promoted as 'green' mirror because it replaces copper and palladium is totally non-reactive. And the mirror lifetime doubles to 50 years.
Progressive early adopters of clean energy are very sensitive to environmental footprints.
BTW, I was using two different isolated evaluations... existing renewable technologies can displace 25% of existing fossil fuel use at no additional cost. Separately, efficiency can displace 50% of existing fossil fuel use with even better returns on investment. And I have high hopes for new technologies of all types.
(We are nonprofit 501(c)(3), not selling anything, just looking for solutions to global warming, and getting old.)
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