Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  About the Author

  Daniel B. Botkin is Professor (Emeritus), Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, and President, The Center for The Study of The Environment, a nonprofit corporation that provides independent, science-based analyses of complex environmental issues. The New York Times has called him “one of the world’s leading environmental researchers,” who has “done much to popularize the concept of using yet maintaining the world’s natural resources.”

  His research includes creating the first successful computer simulation in ecology; studies of wilderness and natural parks ecosystems—from the Serengeti Plains of Africa to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Minnesota and Isle Royale National Park; threatened and endangered species—whooping cranes, salmon, bowhead and sperm whales, and African elephants. He was among the first to investigate possible ecological effects of global warming and to help NASA use satellite imaging to study the Earth’s global environment.

  His dozen books include Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century, which “is considered by many ecologists to be the classic text of the [environmental] movement,” according to The New York Times. Beyond the Stony Mountains describes nature in the American West before European settlement, based on the journals of Lewis and Clark. No Man’s Garden analyzes the value of nature and the relationship between people and nature. He has published op-ed pieces in many major newspapers concerning global warming, biological diversity, and energy, and more than 150 scientific papers.

  His recent awards include the Astor Annual Lectureship for 2007 (Oxford University); annual distinguished visiting scholar for 2008 (Green Mountain College, Vermont); and the Long Beach Aquarium, Long Beach, California, has appointed him its first-ever distinguished visiting scientist for November 2008. He is also the recipient of the Fernow Award for Outstanding Contributions in International Forestry and the winner of the Mitchell International Prize for Sustainable Development.

  His other academic appointments include Professor of Biology and Director of The Program in Global Change at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA; Professor of Systems Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; and Research Scientist, The Ecosystems Center, Woods Hole, MA. His degrees are B.A. (Physics; University of Rochester), M.A. (Literature, University of Wisconsin), and Ph.D. (Biology, Rutgers University).

  Preface

  What this book is

  This book is about how to solve our energy problem. It presents the facts concerning our energy needs, desires, and supplies, and the environmental and human effects of obtaining and using energy. It also includes calculations and analyses based on these facts. The purpose of the book is to provide U.S. citizens and our elected representatives with information that will enable us to make rational, economically and environmentally sound decisions.

  What is our energy problem, and why do we have it? Some people believe that energy is a problem only because continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to undesirable global warming. But even without that possibility, the people of the world, and especially the people of the United States who use more energy than any other nation, have an energy problem: The need and desire for energy will increase faster than it can be provided from standard sources. As the world’s population grows, and as living standards and expectations rise, people around the world will want more energy. Meanwhile, petroleum is limited and, according to estimates by petroleum geologists and economists, is likely to become so rare by 2050 that it may be too expensive for most energy applications. Pollution from fossil fuels will also continue to be a problem and is likely to worsen with increased mining and use. As the human population continues to grow and as quality-of-life expectations rise, competition for land and water will also increase. For the United States, military and economic security are also strong reasons for seeking energy independence, or as close to that as possible.

  Some believe that we should become energy minimalists, each person using as little energy as possible. This book takes a different tack. It assumes that we should use energy as efficiently as possible, but that abundant energy is necessary for the quality of life that people today expect. Minimal energy would be that required to provide food, water, shelter, and access to medical care. Civilizations require more. People need to be educated; funds are needed for arts, humanities, sciences, and for recreation and entertainment. Life should be joyful, and music, dance, and the graphic arts don’t come energy-free. If people have such limited energy available that they can only focus on the bare necessities of life, they don’t have time to think about who to vote for, how to organize and run a political campaign, go to town meetings, and so on—the things that we take for granted but are necessary for a democracy. Thus it also may be that democracies benefit from, or even require, more than the minimal energy required for the barest human survival.

  Of course, there is a wide range between just enough energy to get food, water, and shelter, and to have everything anyone could ever want—and the decision about what is a quality of life and what is extravagance is a question that goes far beyond this book. My point only is that we cannot have peace, culture, joy, and civilization, let alone freedom and democracy, without energy that allows us to do more than just survive. In the last chapter, I consider various scenarios, some of which contrast very great differences in per capita energy use.

  And abundant and superabundant energy can be used for evil as well as good, fueling wars, vast armies, oppressive dictatorships, and terrorism, the worst of man’s actions. But without enough energy, no one can work for what is good about and for people. Energy is the key. Physicists define energy as the capacity or the ability to move matter, which means it is necessary for a human being to do anything, including those things that are worthwhile and good.

  The good news is that our energy problem can be solved: Today’s technology can solve it. America can be energy-independent—our nation can provide a sufficient and sustainable supply of energy with relatively little change in the quality of our lives or in our overall standard of living. Indeed, done with great care, it will result in a better environment and an improved quality of life for most of us.

  The tough news is that achieving this energy independence will be expensive and will require a national commitment that is unusual for a democracy, although not unprecedented. Examples of such commitment in our past include the expansion of European-based civilization westward with the Louisiana Purchase, the response of the nation to the Great Depression of the 1930s and to World War II, and our success in putting a man on the moon ten years after we decided to do so. However, such concerted national efforts are rare. Mostly, we tend to muddle through, often waiting to rebuild a bridge until the old one finally collapses.

  The solution requires informed citizens and informed politicians. It requires political will and individual personal commitments in ways that we have not chosen to seek in past decades. A necessary and important part of energy independence is clear thinking, rational, science-based analysis. It requires innovation, creativity, invention, and entrepreneurship. This book is meant to be a foundation for the path to energy independence.

  What this book is not

  Two energy-related topics that are mentioned but not discussed in depth are carbon offsets and subsidies. The subject of subsidies is so big and complicated that a separate book would be needed to analyze the subsidies for each source of energy from cradle to grave—from discovery, invention, and exploration, to use and the problems of dealing with the wastes and land conversions. The same holds true for carbon offsets. By seeking a way to replace all fossil fuels, this book does point the way to reducing the production of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. It just does not deal with the particulars and differences in carbon dioxide releases among different energy sources. There is no intention to minimize the importance of either of these topics.

  The focus here is on how energy supply can be obtained technolo
gically in a way that is as environmentally beneficial and benign as possible. Although I do discuss costs to some extent, this is not a book primarily about economics. My hope is that this book will provide a basis from which economists and others can consider in much greater detail the economic consequences of difference choices and the ways that a society and individuals can be motivated to choose and work toward a specific solution.

  The energy solution has become a major political and ideological debate, and obviously a great deal of money, influence, and direction of our society is at stake. During the past few years, I have been asked to discuss the solution to energy supply in a number of forums, sometimes as part of a panel discussion or debate. It should not be surprising that many approach this important topic from a specific political and ideological goal, which leads them to pick the facts that support these goals and ignore those that don’t. I believe that this approach is a road to failure. Of course, no one can be completely free of prejudgments and emotional assumptions, but to solve a large-scale technological problem like energy supply requires a rational approach. We have to be careful to see this as more of an engineering problem, solidly based in science, than an expression of a political philosophy or ideological conviction.

  Why I wrote this book

  As an ecologist with a background in physics, and as chairman of the Environmental Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have long been interested in how energy is obtained and used in natural ecosystems, how energy from our environment affects us, and how we affect our environment in our pursuit of energy. For my work, I had to keep up with energy issues, and in doing so noticed some odd contradictions that began to occur around 2002. Solar and wind were already providing energy in many parts of the world, but environmental economists I worked with kept telling me a different story. “The conventional wisdom,” they said, was that solar and wind power can never amount to anything.

  At that time, my son, Jonathan, worked for a company called PowerLight, which manufactured and installed some of the largest solar energy facilities in the world. (He had previously worked for U.S. Wind-power.) Deciding it might be interesting for all involved, I set up a series of telephone conferences between the environmental economists and the PowerLight engineers. Each time one of the economists asked a question about solar power and was answered by an engineer, the economist would reply, “But according to conventional wisdom, solar and wind energy can never amount to anything.” This went on for three weeks of conference calls, until finally the engineers and I gave up, discouraged because nobody seemed interested in the facts.

  Soon afterward, the New York Times published an interview with James Lovelock, the famous British chemist and environmentalist who came up with what he called “the Gaia Hypothesis,” an expression of the idea that we are all connected to all of life by a planetary system. Commenting on the energy problem, Lovelock said, “If it makes people feel good to shove up a windmill or put a solar panel on their roof, great, do it. It’ll help a little bit, but it’s no answer at all to the problem.”

  Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people in developing nations were buying or building cheap solar and wind devices to provide them with enough electricity to cook their food, run computers and some small home appliances, and thereby join the modern age. It wasn’t just making them feel good; it was improving the fundamentals of their lives.

  With all the debate about our energy supply, the end of the era of cheap and abundant oil and gas, and concerns about global warming, I decided to look at each form of energy: how much is available, how much we now use, how much we will use in the future, and what our options are to move away from fossil fuels. The approach would be the same one I have used for all scientific problems: looking at the most reliable data available and making the obvious calculations and analyses. In the past, I’d always been surprised by what the facts revealed, because so often what they told me contradicted the conventional wisdom. In many cases, the facts—especially quantitative information—necessary to reach a conclusion are completely lacking because nobody ever bothered to get them, and without these, of course, even the simplest calculations and analyses haven’t been done.

  With so many people talking and writing about the energy issue, why should you pay attention to this book? Because to the best of my ability I have hunted down the most solid facts and information and analyzed them as carefully and as free of my personal biases as possible, searching out the facts, doing the calculations, and checking those measurements and calculations with experts in their fields. You will surely find some of the results surprising, and I hope you will also find them helpful.

  Introduction

  Blackout!

  Figure I-1 The big blackout of 2003. A bright full moon over a darkened New York City skyline during the blackout that started Thursday, Aug. 14, 2003, and affected 80,000 square miles in the eastern United States and Canada. (Source: Bob Gomel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  Thursday, August 14, 2003

  It was one of those muggy New York City summer days that began like all the others. But it ended in a way that was an eerie precursor of the electric-power problems that would have major impacts on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and remain an ominous threat to all of us who live in a modern industrialized society.

  Our apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, west of Fifth Avenue between 34th Street and 14th Street, had an unobstructed view of the city from the 20th floor but did not have air conditioning. It had “air cooling”—cool air pumped from a central energy plant through underground steam pipes and up into our apartment—and on this hot day it was doing its usual mediocre job, making it only about 5 degrees cooler inside than out. Indeed, as the morning wore on, our eastward-facing terrace fell into shade and actually became more comfortable than the apartment. We leaned against the railing and looked up at the Empire State Building just to the northeast.

  As always, Manhattan was an impressive sight, a seemingly invincible metropolis, a triumph of modern civilization over raw nature. Our use of abundant and cheap energy was everywhere evident: in the streets teeming with taxis, buses, and trucks; in the sounds of big air-conditioning units on rooftops, jackhammers, and street cleaners—sounds of internal combustion engines of every size. Even indoors we could hear our heating/cooling convectors blowing, the elevators running, the water pumps thumping through the walls, an amplified guitar played by an upstairs neighbor, someone’s vacuum cleaner, and power tools being used to renovate an apartment somewhere in the building.

  But unknown to us, hundreds of miles away in the Midwest something was going wrong that would soon affect this great city and thousands of square miles around it.1

  Noon: New York City’s temperature climbed to 91°F, the hottest so far that month. It hadn’t rained to amount to anything for ten days, and it hadn’t been this hot since July 5, when the temperature climbed to 92° F. Today, the sun shone through a gray-blue haze.2

  It wasn’t hot just in New York City; it was hot throughout the northeastern United States and adjacent Canada, and air conditioners across these thousands of square miles drew huge amounts of electricity. That electricity flowed over a gigantic grid system, thousands and thousands of miles of high-tension wires across the Midwest and eastern United States and Canada, from the Great Lakes of Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean shores of Canada. The Midwest Independent Transmission System managed the huge electrical grid of the eastern United States and Canada for about 30 big power companies.

  In elementary school, we were given a pamphlet from the local power company that showed a picture-book idealization of how electricity gets to your house. There was a generating station, usually shown as a hydroelectric-power dam, with wires coming out of it that ran along tall high-tension poles across the countryside to your town and then through a series of transfer points to a telephone pole outside your house and then to your home. It seemed simple: a place that made power, a wa
y to transmit it, and us to use it.

  But that isn’t how it works anymore for most of North America. Instead, energy from many generating stations flows into a central grid, and this grid then spreads like a complex spider web throughout the countryside so that everybody’s home is ultimately connected to everybody’s source of energy, more or less. And the sources of energy were becoming more varied every year, with wind turbines and solar energy parks beginning to add electricity to the grid. The giant tangle of wires consists of more than 150,000 miles of interlocked power lines connecting plants that generate more than 850,000 megawatts. This amount of energy is hard to imagine, but look at it this way: One megawatt of electricity is about enough to power 300 homes, so the grid carries enough electricity for 255 million homes.

  New York State alone was using 28,000 megawatts. That’s more than 37 million horsepower, enough to run 370,000 automobiles starting a race at full acceleration at the same time; enough to power 280 million 100-watt light bulbs, about one bulb for every person in the United States at that time.3 But unlike those 370,000 cars, all these electrical devices were connected, like the colored lights on a Christmas tree.4 The surges were huge, too, 3 billion watts surging up and down New York State’s high-tension power lines.