Fighting Against the Future · 8:27pm Feb 19th, 2021
I’m not sure how long this post will be, so let’s just dive headfirst into it, shall we?
I’ve seen a rash of opinion articles (sometimes masquerading as “news” pieces) making the rounds lately that have left me feeling just more than a little put out. They’ve been on Facebook and social media, and I’ve seen people posting and sharing them with comments like “Yes, I’d never thought of it this way!” or other statements of affirmation. I’ve even had some of my direct family members talk about them with me.
The thing is? I disagree with these “news” pieces on a very firm level. See, these “news” pieces are written by what I would call “clockstoppers,” or what Axtara would refer to as “a near Pardellian Order.”
Maybe you’ve seen some of them around. There’s been a serious rash of them lately. Articles on the “dangerous conditions of lithium mining.” Or on how maybe “solar panels aren’t so green 30 years down the road.”
These articles make long, emotional appealing arguments about how everyone “thinks” electric vehicles are green, but look at this one lithium mine and what lithium mining is like! Or talks about how everyone is really excited about solar panels and wind turbines, but what will we do when those panels and turbines reach the end of their life in 30-50 years? What will become of us then?
I say “emotional appeal” because that’s what it is. These articles don’t address scientific data or real numbers, or when they do, it’s usually just the one that backs up their point. Which is? Well, to put it bluntly:
We should all refuse these new things because they’re new and scary, and we have something that works “good enough” already.
Speaking to the specific example and not the general, but:
(TL;DR: The articles as written may be crap, but the point they're making isn't)
Being the relevant sort of engineer, I have run the numbers on (for example) the effects of electrifying transportation in my region. Insert a whole pile of math here, but the electric grid can not sustain doing so. We'd look like Texas around Monday, but indefinitely. Given our climate, a larger percentage of solar and wind won't help, they'd make things worse. We'd also need a large (much larger than current) base load nuclear capacity. We've already developed all the ecologically and economically viable hydro sources, and we're shifting from coal to gas, but that has its own supply constraints (again, see: Texas, Monday).
Jevons' Paradox generally holds in these situations. TL;DR: increased efficiency reduces the unit price of the resource. This expands the economically viable uses for the resource, which increases overall consumption, far beyond any decreases in use provided by the efficiency itself. "The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics. However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising."
I've done the math. I've taken courses on the math. I've read textbooks walking me through the math. You can't run a modern industrial society on 100% renewables, or 80% renewables, or 60% renewables. You either need the majority of the base load (about 75% of demand, which would increase massively as we transition away from end-user fossil fuel energy sources) to be provided by something with ~100% guaranteed availability, like coal or nuclear, or you need sufficient storage (on the order of 400 new Hoover dams for the US) to fake it. Unless you have a fusion generator in your pocket, and it has an operating cost around the same as a coal plant, we have a rather large problem.
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Aren't you making the same mistake those articles do, however, in trying to compare current setups with future growth?
—Emphasis and context added.
The same arguments have been made for hundreds of years. In addition, I'm not saying we shouldn't be making use of nuclear (though these same articles do from time to time).
Yes, the Jevon's Paradox is a thing. So is Malthus predicted proof that mankind would starve by 1798, births having outstripped the possibility of food production.
But we're still here.
The energy grid will change. Resource consumption will change. The grid as is now couldn't take everyone having solar panels on their roof and batteries in their basement ... but this isn't a situation where we're wishing upon a genie. This will be a gradual shift, and if electric grids don't, can't, or won't adapt to it, they'll find themselves replaced by new grids from forward-thinking individuals.
Your post, while sound in the moment, makes the same type of arguments made against cars and for the use of the horse and buggy, which was a massive debate at the time in favor, mathematically, of the horse. And yet ... here we are.
It'll probably be a debate long into the future, but with plenty of new topics and math.
I don't think so. There's "room gradual improvement", but then there's "we need to redo from start to make this work", and then there's "we'd need different laws of physics for this to work". Several of these issues are in the latter categories.
An all-renewable grid is somewhere between "redo from start" and "can't be done", if by "grid" we mean something remotely near the scale of what we have now, or with electricity costs at or below what we pay now. The technology isn't there, and the physics make it difficult to get it there. It may never be economically viable. Micro-grids on that basis are physically possible, but the economics and efficiencies are terrible.
The Green Revolution was (if you'll pardon the phrase) a case of eating our seed corn. We've massively increased short-term production at the cost of long-term damage to soil, depletion of aquifers which only refill on geologic timescales, and consuming huge quantities of non-renewable chemical fertilizers. We've merely delayed Malthus, and when he comes back, he'll be hungrier than ever.
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."