Ambitious clean energy goals abound—the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, for example, proposes the switch to 42% renewable energy in the U.S by 2030—but are we selling ourselves short? Stanford civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson and UC Davis researcher Mark Delucchi think we are. The pair has created a plan to power the planet using only wind, water, and solar energy by 2030.
According to Jacobson and Delucchi, making the full switch to renewables could cut the world’s power demand by 30%, making the transition more energy and cost-efficient than sticking with fossil fuels. That’s because vehicles that use fossil fuels and biomass combustion are inefficient; they lose up to 80% of energy to heat (the rest is converted into motion). In comparison, energy produced by electricity loses only 20% to heat. So by transitioning to renewables, Jacobson and Delucchi claim we could eliminate the need for 13,000 coal plants and save enough cash to justify the switch.
How can we possibly convert to 100% renewables in the next 20 years? Jacobson and Delucchi say we’ll need 3.8 million large wind turbines, 89,000 300-megawatt solar plants, 490,000 tidal turbines, 1.7 billion rooftop photovoltaic systems, and 900 hydroelectric plants. For some perspective, only 2% of these renewable energy facilities currently exist, and that’s not including the untold numbers of transmission lines that we’d have to build.
It seems like an absurdly difficult task, but Jacobson and Delucchi’s point is that it’s possible. We have the technical know-how and all the materials necessary to make this happen. But do we have the political will?
[Via Stanford]
(via Fast Company)
My utterly ignorant guess: we don’t have the political will. But even if we did, and we did it, would the increase in efficiency and/or capacity simply cause demand to rise? Relatedly, do we actually want (more) electrical power, or do we want to reduce demand?
I don’t have any definitive or even clever answers to these questions. But I do think the engineering quest to “solve” the “electrical power problem” misunderstands the problem. In particular, the understanding of the problem is too small. The canonical formulation is: Demand is high, going up, and will continue to go up. We need to ensure that supply meets demand.
The “green” formulation adds to this: We need to ensure that supply meets demand without making use of fossil fuels.
A stricter formulation adds further: We need to ensure that supply meets demand without making use of fossil fuels or any other nonrenewable resource (like nukes).
But we need to ask: why? Why does demand go up, what is the electrical power used for, why is demand so high in the first place? If, as Jeff Wong asks, present material practices are “unsustainable”, what is the purpose of trying to sustain them? I might submit that instead of trying to ensure that future power supply meets current demand under a new constraint regime (no more fossil/nonrenewable fuels) — the engineering [or, less charitably, we might say ‘reductionist’] approach — we should acknowledge that electrical power is what economists call an intermediate good, not an end in itself, and reformulate the problem: what does electrical power get us that we want (and need), in terms of human values?
In abstract terms that relate to an optimization formalism (maybe an offensive approach to formulate societal ‘problems’ for some readers, but one that I will contend is still useful for thinking purposes, even if not necessarily for political ones), we should not understand the objective function as fixed and the constraints as changing as ‘science’ tells us new things (like OMG GUYZ TEH ATMOSFEER IT GOT TEH CARBON DOXIDE TEH OCEAN IT ARE GOIN UP, etc.) but rather that there is an ongoing interplay between the objective function and the constraints: as constraints change, we rearticulate the problem such that it is more in line with contemporary ‘realities’. (See also Bebbington’s discussion, following Sen, Giddens, and Habermas, of ‘instrumental action’ as compared to ‘hermeneutic action’; we might understand this re-examination and -articulation of the problem as a ‘reinterpretation’ of our [newly understood] predicament [that is, a hermeneutic action] rather than a continuation of the quest to find new ‘solutions’ to a preexisting problem [an instrumental action]. Of course, engineering historically figures itself ‘modestly’ [cf. Haraway’s Modest Witness] as a discipline in service to others: other disciplines, policy makers, business, etc., and thus is not historically good at examining, reinterpreting, or critiquing the problems given to it; see e.g., Agre’s “notes toward a critical technical practice” for a vaguely related discussion in artificial intelligence, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s short and lovely article on engaging ambivalence about the applications of research in engineering culture.)
Concretely then, I want to argue: we should not ask how to meet existing demand given new constraints but rather ask what scale of power generation is reasonable given these new constraints, and how we should allocate the power generated. This follows the ordering of problems articulated by the ecological economists: scale, then distribution, then allocation. Scale is an ecological/technological question; distribution a political one; and allocation an economic one. This means we need to begin with an examination of ecological limits given existing technological capabilities, proceed to a political discussion of social priorities — who gets to use the power? for what ends? — and conclude by examining traditional economic questions around allocation and the appropriate design of market mechanisms. Developing new technologies to increase scale (or even proliferating discourse that claims that such technologies are on their way) pushes back discussions around distribution that should be happening sooner rather than later. Engineers, politicians, and venture capitalists like this approach because such discussions are fundamentally political in nature, and therefore exceed the expertise of engineers and threaten the power bases of politicians and venture capitalists.
[This is hastily scribbled. I apologize for lack of clarity and underdevelopment of argument. No doubt I have, against Arundhati Roy’s warning, simplified some things which are complicated and complicated some things which are, in truth, simple. But hopefully it made some sense. I care about this conversation, so I welcome requests for clarification, rebukes, criticisms, etc. If you read this far, obviously you have serious issues and we should be friends.]
