Cincinnatus BLOG *** Political Commentary - Social Commentary

Today, we can only sustain a small proportion of earth’s population at a sophisticated economic level without dramatically increasing carbon dioxide production. Energy use is the direct correlate of a vibrant economy - in the United States for example, we consume 24% of the world’s oil and are responsible for approximately 28% of global GDP. This is no accident. The power that propelled hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Japan and North America to economic prosperity must be shared with the billions in the emerging world. Understandably, these large emerging nations are unwilling to wait for the ultimate clean energy innovation to power the world of the future. They want a seat at the prosperity table and they want it now. It would be the height of arrogance for the developed world to even hint that the window of economic opportunity has closed for the mass of humanity because we fear it will impair the quality of our pristine world.

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The dilemma is clear: no amount of sacrifice or conservation by the hundreds of millions will offset the incremental contribution of the billions as they strive for economic equality. In 2006 China generated more carbon dioxide than the United States and thus, became the worlds largest producer of greenhouse gasses, a dubious distinction at best.  Though their per capita utilization of energy is only a fraction of Americans, China and for that matter India’s sheer size will ultimately dwarf our greenhouse contribution. As they approach western efficiency in the use of energy the amount of carbon dioxide produced per Btu of energy generated will decline but the size of their populations will exacerbate an already complex problem. (Btu - Unit of heat energy equal to the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree.) China and India have clearly demonstrated some willingness to begin to address this issue by making major commitments to clean wind, hydroelectric and nuclear energy, but the scale of the problem will continue to grow. No short-term domestic policy in the United States can change this arithmetic time bomb. The race is on between inexorable global prosperity and technological innovation to avert global environmental deterioration.

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We often appear to ignore the intrinsic reality that all life is carbon based and that at the moment all accessible large-scale sources of energy save nuclear and hydroelectric, are correspondingly carbon based.  As a recent World Street Journal Editorial on August 5, 2008 pointed out, “The U.S. has a great deal invested in fossil fuels not because of a political conspiracy or because anyone worships carbon but because other sources of energy are, right now, inferior”.

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The Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Department of Energy reported in its July 2008 report on Renewable Energy Trends in Consumption and Electricity 2006, that total renewable energy consumption increased by 478 trillion Btu or 7 percent between 2005 and 2006 to 6,922 trillion Btu. At the same time total US energy consumption decreased 1 percent largely due to decreases across the board in fossil fuel energy consumption. The combination of these trends resulted in moving renewable energy’s share of total US energy to nearly 7 percent, up from over 6 percent in 2005.

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The Role of Renewable Energy Consumption in the Nation’s Energy
Supply, 2006
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There are two main components of our energy needs, power generation and transportation. Oil powers our transportation system, gasoline, aviation fuel etc. but the 4,000 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity generated each year in the United States is produced by coal plants 51%; nuclear power 21%, natural gas 16%, oil 3% and renewable resources 9%, most of which is hydropower. The electrical sector’s carbon dioxide emissions come about 82% from burning coal, 13% from natural gas, 3% from petroleum, and none at all from nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. The EPA estimates that electricity generation is the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. accounting for 41% of all CO2 emissions. Wind, Biomass and solar hold promise but at best can only be deployed on a relatively limited scale over the next two decades. Harnessing wind will probably always play a valuable supportive role but geothermal and solar are virtually unlimited - if only we had the technology to exploit it.

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Two issues often become confused in our discussion of energy, independence from the $700 billion in foreign oil we purchase annually, and generation of electricity. Power Generation as noted above is not dependent upon foreign oil as is often alluded to in the popular press but rather on domestic coal and even less carbon dioxide friendly fossil fuel. No one solution is going to solve our massive need for clean domestic energy to power our electricity grid and our transportation system.

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Although generation of electricity and transportation are not necessarily mutually exclusive, lets first examine the future of power generation and the alternatives that are available to us. To understand the massive scope of the problem the United States Government Energy Information Administration estimates that to keep the economy growing at a modest 2.4% per year, total electricity purchases will increase by 29 percent from 3,659 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 to 4,705 billion in 2030, an average growth rate of 1.1 percent per year. The relatively slow growth follows the historical trend, with the growth rate slowing in each succeeding decade, as we become more energy efficient.

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Annual Electricity Purchases by Sector 1980-2030

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The need for additional power generation is becoming critical, we now have less than 20% reserve capacity in the United States and it is being brought to us over an antiquated grid system. Whatever solutions we ultimately employ they must provide massive amounts additional power and it must be done cleanly and distributed on a modern network to the areas where it is needed. The nexus with transportation is clear, at the moment we can only hope that new plug in hybrid cars will access the system in off peak hours and not cause its total collapse. If we are truly serious about building 10-20 million or more plug in cars over the next two decades we will first have to build clean energy generating plants and a network to distribute that power in support of such an effort.

Clean alternate energy sources will be evaluated in subsequent posts.

Source of graphics: Energy Information Association