Our Energy Future

The future of our nation’s and the world’s energy security has been a significant issue since the 1970s. While we have a steep uphill climb to ever be free from the dominance of the oil producing nations and the pollution from coal and other fossil fuels; there are a few positive signs. The US, Europe, and China are increasing their share of electricity being produced by renewables such as wind and solar. The pace of this transition is far too slow, but it is moving along even if the pace is glacially slow in the US.

What is needed to become energy independent is a long way off. We need to move to an almost all electric society and nobody alive today will see that happen. This implies an entire fleet of all electric vehicles, and on the positive side, there are now over a dozen major auto manufacturers with imminent electric hybrids and four companies planning on releasing all electric vehicles by 2012. As electric vehicles come on-line, there will be a need for more electricity and this can either offset the rise in renewable energy or could actually lead to more CO2 emissions by burning more coal and natural gas to supply the electricty needed.

Currently, one quarter of all electricity used is used for lighting. The advent of affordable LED lights that last ten times as long as standard incandescent bulbs while consuming about 1/10th the power will go a long way to reducing some of that added requirement. Architects are talking about talking about the discussion about the conversation on “green” building, but only a handful are actually doing anything. Since heating of homes and buildings is a major component of our energy use, this of course is another easy fix that isn’t sexy enough to gain much attention.

I’m looking into my crystal ball. We just had a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. All the lips in the nation’s capital are flapping like mad. My crystal ball tells me that within a year the memory of this spill will begin to fade and within five years everything will be business as usual and we’ll be drilling new wells all over our coasts and waiting for the next environmental disaster. We’ll be told we must do this, we must continue to build our dependance on oil and avoid the obvious solution, which is, do whatever it takes to break our addiction. The analogy to a drug addiction is a good one since how we have dealt with energy has been precisely the way a drug addict deals with their problem, and that is, ignore it. If you’ve known a real drug addict, you know this is true. The solution seems so obvious, but it always manages to elude the addict until they have no choice, which is usually too late. Breaking a drug habit is far easier said than done, but to break an energy dependency all it takes is political will and lots of money. We never had political will and the money we had was squandered fighting two wars at, by some estimates, between two and three trillion dollars.

We are told, like we have been told for the past 37 years, that we must wait for the technological innovations that are right around the corner. Sadly, we can’t afford to wait, but we will wait just the same. We are told renewable energy is too expensive, but if we factor in the trillions spent fighting in the Middle East, renewables are a bargain compared to oil. If we factor in the health and environmental costs of oil and coal and even natural gas, it’s even more of a bargain. Alas, we will only do what we know we must when there is no more oil, no more coal, and no more opposition.

We will only change our ways when we are left no choice. You’d think the BP oil spill would be a wakeup call, but who really cares about a few billion fish, a few thousand square miles of ocean, about contaminated food supplies, beaches, and lord only knows what other consequences of this spill and the next and the next and the next. The country is suffering through a brutally hot summer which some claim is a sign of things to come. We’ll wait to see if they are right. Perhaps after we have a hundred years of steadily climbing triple digit heat waves, then we’ll start to talk about the outline for a discussion on the possibility of talks. Perhaps mass starvation due to droughts and water shortages would get the discussion rolling. Perhaps a few terrorists knocking out just one refinery and throwing the entire US economy into a tailspin would do it.  Maybe a scientist will figure out that the alarming rise in childhood disease such as autism is caused by the heavy metals emitted by coal plants or automobile tailpipes. We should just wait and see. Its worth the risk to save a few bucks, right.

When we are forced up against the wall and we have no options left, like say a sustained oil embargo, then we’ll act and we’ll do things in a way that are many orders of magnitude more expensive than they’d be today, and all those that had been telling us how expensive renewable energy was would claim they were right. They aren’t right, but they will be.

Even what we are doing today is bordering on the absurd. There is a small energy project on the drawing boards. I won’t mention it by name or the players because I don’t want to see it stopped, but how it is being portrayed is mind boggling. The project costs $300,000, $250,000 of which is being paid for by the utility and the other $50,000 by the business. The business claims that it will save $9,000 per year so it expects to recoup its investment in a little over 7 years. The rest of us get to pay for the other part. The real payback would be 33.37 years, greater than the anticipated life of the equipment. I am skeptical of the $9,000 figure too, since that’s optimal performance and where the project is situated has a number of serious issues for that sort of project. I’m all for doing anything, and this certainly is anything, but if that same project were situated in the Nevada desert and the energy were just credited to the businesses account, everyone would be far better off and we’d get far more bang for the buck and that $9,000 savings could easily be $15,000 or more and the projects life would likely be longer as well. This sort of thing is being done all across the nation, doing the right thing in the wrong place and hiding the true costs. That’s my point about finding the most expensive ways to fund what must be done.

Bottom line. We’ve got a steep hill to climb and more and more people are placing obstacles in our way.

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