How does something go wrong with the grid? When the electrical energy transmitted exceeds the amount that the wires can carry, they overheat and may sag or break, and if this doesn’t happen, the transformers and other devices blow out. As the 2003 blackout illustrated, when one part of the system goes down, another becomes overloaded and fails, until the entire system crashes like a bunch of dominos. Also, the grid transmits alternating current, not direct current, and this must be generated precisely at the standard 60 cycles a second. If not, the entire system can get out of phase, overheating can occur, and the grid will fail even if the total amount of electricity flowing over the wires has not surpassed the maximum. The grid’s electrical load has grown even greater since the blackout of 2003.18
The evidence provided so far in this book favors solar and wind energy, but this requires us to improve our ability to transmit electricity long distances over electric power grids and to put more emphasis on off-the-grid applications and what are known as microgrids, which transmit the electricity locally to a number of users over transmission lines. An analysis of the problems with the present electrical grid by Roger Anderson and Albert Boulanger of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, N.Y., published in Mechanical Engineering Power & Energy, concludes that “the present U.S. electric grid will not work on any scale—local, state, national, or international—at the higher loads and more diverse generation sources required in the future, let alone if the terrorist threat becomes more severe. Failing to upgrade the system will leave us unprepared and, ultimately, in the dark.”
But little is happening. According to the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which assesses such things, only 2,000 miles of electrical transmission lines were added in 2006, less than 1% of the total and much less than what is needed, not even considering the need for repairing, replacing, and upgrading existing lines.19
One of the most important uses of fossil fuels in the next years will be to provide power that can be brought online at times when demand exceeds the supply of electricity generated by wind and solar. Microturbines—basically, the same engines that power jet aircraft—are right now used for this because the engines can be brought up to speed quickly to provide electricity when there is a sudden increase in demand.
A smart grid
Experts also favor a smart grid. Several advocacy groups have emerged calling for this, including the Galvin Electricity Initiative and the GridWise Alliance. The former is the brainchild of Bob Galvin, retired CEO of Motorola Corporation, who has made this a major activity since leaving that company. He argues that power outages cost the United States $150 billion a year and that the smart grid would prevent them with the use of automatic switching systems that involve computer and Internet-like communication and control. The smart grid will involve advanced management of electrical devices such as home water heaters, whose energy use could be automatically reduced when overall grid electrical demand surged. It would also have the capability to turn the charging of electrical vehicles on and off so that charging takes place primarily during off-peak times.20
Think of the transition from dumb grid to smart grid as similar to the transition from telephone lines in the first half of the 20th century, with operators handling all the calls, to the present cell phone world of phoning, text-messaging, game-playing, GPS, and the ability to contact your computer from anywhere.
The smart grid moved out of the idea stage in 2008 when Xcel Energy Corporation began installing a test system in Boulder, Colorado, that included smart meters that tell a customer how much electricity he uses and makes possible real-time adjustments. The idea is that this information can motivate people to reduce their use of electricity.
Surprisingly, redundancy has not been the common approach for the grid. As a result, using today’s grid is a little like flying big commercial airplanes on one engine all the time, with your fingers crossed, just hoping that nothing goes wrong. Actually, substations are quite vulnerable, not only to lightning in a thunderstorm, but even to a squirrel that has found its way into a dangerous place and steps across two high-voltage wires.
A little-discussed danger is the possibility of a terrorist attack on any of the energy-distribution systems, which are quite vulnerable. Ironically, the smart grid, with its Internet-like computer controls, might be even more vulnerable to cyberterrorism. Safeguarding their large-scale energy-distribution systems presents a major challenge to the United States and other developed nations. This is all the more important because, as emphasized throughout this book, an adequate energy supply is fundamental to modern technological societies, any of which could be crippled at least temporarily by major disruptions in energy distribution. Although advocates for improving the grid discuss this, it remains one of the least publicized of the major issues about energy supply.
One of the solutions to disruptions of an electrical grid, including terrorism, is to train the grid operators much as airline pilots are trained, using sophisticated computer simulations so that they can experience and learn how to deal with rapid surges in demand. You may recall that one of the major causes of the widespread system failure in 2003 was that grid operators found themselves unable to respond quickly enough and get power companies to cooperate.
Advocates of the smart grid call for a large-scale integrated system of energy production, transmission, and storage, including novel kinds of energy storage, such as huge flywheels and underground compressed air in caverns and superbatteries and elevated water reservoirs.21 They also call for novel, experimental methods of energy transmission, such as low-temperature superconductors. The first experiment with this kind of transmission took place in 2008 at Brookhaven, Long Island, New York, where the $60 million Holbrook Superconduction Project started 138,000 volts of electricity flowing along a half-mile of wires that were cooled to minus 371° centigrade by liquid nitrogen and were no bigger in diameter than spaghetti.22
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached an agreement with Consolidated Edison Corporation in 2007 to install superconducting cables beneath New York City to connect two Manhattan substations (big transformers that change the voltage of electrical currents) so that if one burns out, the other can take over. The superconducting cable for Manhattan is in the planning stage and is supposed to be installed and running in December 2010, but this is not certain. One reason that superconducting cables are planned is that so many underground wires, cables, and pipes exist in Manhattan, let alone subways and train tracks, that little room remains for massive new cable systems. A second reason is that heat generated by standard transmission lines would create problems in the crowded underground.
How much will it cost to repair, restore, and develop the electrical grid? According to the Edison Electric Institute, it will cost at least $450 billion (Figure 10.4). But this does not include all the costs of the smart grid or more exotic developments like superconducting cables.
Figure 10.4 Costs to improve the electrical grid (Edison Electric Institute estimates).
No grid?
Our use of energy in the future will involve a greater degree of independence from the grid and from major national energy networks. This will be made possible by solar and wind energy and by the development of local microgrids, referred to earlier. Our future energy supply will also involve the integration of different forms of energy and energy transportation—including, in particular, the conversion of electrical energy to hydrogen. Some call for a hydrogen economy, meaning that hydrogen would become the fuel of choice and, along with electricity, the primary means of transporting energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) claims that the United States could convert to a hydrogen economy in ten years.23
This would seem an extreme challenge, with the nation not ready for it. But Iceland and Japan illustrate the potential for moves in this direction. Iceland has several filling stations that provide hydrogen as a fuel for cars. In Great Britain a plan is in development to make the Shetland Islands i
ndependent of fossil fuels by producing electricity and hydrogen from wind.24 Denmark built Europe’s first wind-to-hydrogen facility on the island of Lolland.
In sum, however, the idea of a hydrogen economy is controversial and largely untested. Although there is much talk and informal journalism about a hydrogen economy, and the idea has been the topic of several popular books, including Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy,25 the present reality is that such energy systems are only experimental and small-scale, and little is happening in the United States.
The bottom line
• The transport of energy is one of the keys to energy independence, security, and our standard of living and way of life. But compared to questions about whether to go nuclear, switch to biofuels, or keep searching for more fossil fuels, it gets little attention.
• The future of energy in a technologically sophisticated nation will involve better integration of energy networks, a smart electrical grid, and greater use of microgrids—producing and using energy locally, within a relatively small area.
• Too little research, development, and imagination are focused on transporting energy. It should be one of the major areas of innovative energy research, but it is not.
• The move away from fossil fuels, no matter what kind of energy becomes primary, will lead to increased production of electricity. Conversion of electrical energy to gas and liquid fuels will be necessary, but methods and installations are presently woefully inadequate.
11. Transporting things
Figure 11.1 General Motors Hummers weren’t exactly flying off the lot in 2008. That year, movie and television stars discovered electric and hybrid vehicles, and Hummers were left sitting largely unvisited on new-car lots. (Photo by Daniel B. Botkin)
Key facts
• Almost one-third—28%—of the energy we use in the United States is for transporting ourselves and our goods.
• Because our transportation choices are flexible, transportation is a key way to start saving energy quickly.
• In the United States, trains move 40% of all freight. But this generates only 10% of the total U.S. freight revenue because it is so much cheaper and more energy-efficient to ship things by train than by truck.
• Cars and light trucks together use 63% of all energy used for transportation; trains and buses together use just 3%.
• More than 6% of all energy used in the United States is simply to transport coal, mostly so it can be burned as fuel but also as an ingredient of steel.
• Air freight accounts for less than 1% of the total freight moved in the U.S., but 12% of the total U.S. transportation revenue.
• The most fuel-efficient way to move people around on land today is by intercity bus. Trains are next. But for transporting goods of all kinds, you can’t beat ships for fuel efficiency.
The new status symbols: hard-to-get energy-saver cars
The big transportation news of 2008 was the rapid rise in gasoline prices, the subsequent flight from gas guzzlers, and the sudden popularity of smaller electric, hybrid, and hydrogen cars even among America’s glitterati. Joely Fisher, star of Fox’s Til Death TV show, managed to buy one of only 20 available BMW hydrogen cars. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, and opera star Placido Domingo also managed to get theirs. Meanwhile, basketball great Magic Johnson, The Tonight Show’s Jay Leno, and America Ferrera, star of Ugly Betty, were driving the $1-million Chevy Equinox powered by fuel cells.1 Rumor was that George Clooney, Jay Leno, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were on the waiting list for the superfast-accelerating Testar all-electric car (0 to 60 in four seconds, range of 250 miles, top speed 130 mph).2
How could U.S. automakers not have seen it coming?
The mystery in all of this is why the big three auto companies of the United States didn’t see this coming and didn’t plan for it. General Motors hadn’t had a full year of profitability since the early 1990s but kept manufacturing Hummers, big pickups, and SUVs long after all the rest of us had realized that almost all the cars around us on the highway were smaller, fuel-efficient imports. Between May 2007 and May 2008, sales of SUVs fell 38%.3 Thus the real, fundamental transportation news of 2008 was the lack of foresight and planning, both by the big automobile corporations and apparently by much of the federal government.
It wasn’t an obscure forecast that oil prices were going to rise rapidly about this time. As discussed in Chapter 1, “Oil,” petroleum experts have been pointing out for years that when the time of peak oil discovery is reached and passed—estimated to occur between 2020 and 2050—the price of oil will go up. Thus warned, we didn’t have to wait until we were actually in the midst of a fuel crisis, with demand significantly exceeding supply. The rapid rise in the standard of living and the economies of India and China were no secret either. Clearly, oil and gasoline weren’t going to be cheap in the United States much longer.
A corporation that was thinking ahead would have tried to be ahead of the curve by focusing on technological development. Suppose Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, instead of inventing the iPod and the iPhone, and continuing to develop computers in advance of what the public was buying, kept trying to sell bigger and more expensive 1990s desktops forever. That seems to have been the Big Three automakers’ approach when Toyotas, Hondas, and other foreign cars were zooming past them with ever more reliable and fuel-efficient models that soon pushed American cars out of their long-held first-place spot and left them in the dust.
Now we’ve got some catching up to do
Transportation uses 28% of all the energy used in the United States. It is a large percentage, but one that is readily changed. We have great flexibility when it comes to transportation, and it is therefore a key way for us to save energy quickly. When fuel was plentiful and cheap, we became careless and wasteful. Now we need to make wiser choices in how we use transportation energy.
Transportation basics: how? how much? and how efficiently?
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the use of cars and light trucks for personal transportation consumes 63% of the total energy used in the U.S. for transportation. (Cars use 35%; light trucks use 28%.) This is remarkable—our personal transportation in those fashionable pickups and in cars often carrying only the driver uses almost two-thirds of all energy used for transportation in the U.S. Other trucks, including the big semis, use just 16%, aircraft 9%, watercraft 5%, construction and agriculture 4%, pipelines 3%, and trains and buses together another 3%.4, 5, 6
Railroads can carry a ton of cargo 404 miles on just one gallon of fuel. (That’s how the cost of freight transportation is measured, by the cost to move a ton a mile.) A train can carry a ton 10 miles for 1 kilowatt-hour. Remember, that’s just the amount of energy needed to light ten 100-watt bulbs for an hour, and it’s likely that in moving that ton a mile, a railroad at the same time also has at least that many 100-watt bulbs burning an hour. In the United States, trains move 40% of all freight, and they do it with such energy efficiency that rail freight charges are much cheaper than for trucks. As a result, the total revenue received by all U.S. railroads is only 10% of the total paid for transportation—$54 billion.
For air freight, it’s just the other way around—planes move only a little of the freight, less than 1% of the total ton-miles, but at high cost, amounting to 12% of total transportation revenues.
As for boats, since their invention thousands of years ago, it has always been true that transporting freight by water is the cheapest and most fuel-efficient way to move it.
Coal makes up 44% of tonnage transported in the United States and 22% of the ton-miles, so transporting coal consumes 6.21% of all energy used in the U.S. If we did not burn coal, and therefore did not have to transport it, U.S. energy use for transportation would decrease by 6.21%, or 1,821 billion kWh. Thus, moving away from coal is a double savings: It reduces the use of the dirtiest fossil fuel and increases the nation’s energy efficiency.
Improving the energ
y efficiency of transportation
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out some obvious ways to reduce the amount of energy we use for transportation. We can start with automobiles. Americans drive 3 trillion miles a year—10,000 miles a person for every man, woman, and child in the nation!7, 8 In doing so, Americans use 123 trillion gallons of fuel per year, or 412 gallons a person. If there is no change in miles traveled and average miles per gallon, then in 2050 the United States will use 173 trillion gallons of gasoline.
Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence Page 23