How Obama Plans to Improve Energy Infrastructure
If you’ve read the last two installments in this series, Peak Oil and the Grid and Theories That Claim the Sky is Falling, you’ll have some idea of the urgency behind Obama getting the energy infrastructure of the country the investment it needs. Thankfully, Obama gets it. He understands that the grid cannot support alternative energy development in its current state, and that it needs a radical overhaul to turn it into a smart grid.
One of the biggest changes, and also the most controversial, is the need to unify the grid across state lines, in essence, nationalizing all, or part, of the grid. In an interview with Rachel Maddow, Obama said:
One of, I think, the most important infrastructure projects that we need is a whole new electricity grid. Because if we’re going to be serious about renewable energy, I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago. And we’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated from those car batteries, back into the grid. That can create 5 million new jobs, just in new energy. But, it’s huge projects that generally speaking, you’re not going to have private enterprise would want to take all those risks. And we’re going to have to be involved in that process.
So what is a smart grid? How would it differ from what we have now? According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL):
The Modern Grid will have seven key characteristics that benefit consumers, business, utilities and national security:
Self-Heals A self-healing modern grid detects and responds to routine problems and quickly recovers if they occur, minimizing downtime and financial loss.
Motivates and Includes the Consumer With a modern grid, commercial, industrial and residential energy consumers will have visibility into prices and the ability to choose a program and a price that best suits their needs.
Resists Attack Security is built in from the ground up in a modern grid.
Provides Power Quality for 21st Century Needs A modern grid provides electricity free of sags, spikes, disturbances and interruptions. It is suitable to the data centers, computers, electronics and robotic manufacturing that will power our future economy.
Accomodates All Generation and Storage Options A modern grid allows plug-and-play interconnection to practically any source of power, including renewable energy sources and storage.
Enables Markets A modern grid supports consistent operation from coast to coast while allowing innovation locally and regionally.
Optimizes Assets and Operates Efficiently A modern grid allows us to put more power through existing systems, build less new infrastructure and spend less to operate and maintain the grid.
Opponents object to a “national smart grid” on the grounds that many of the current plants and power lines are privately owned and fall explicitly under the jurisdiction of the states in which they reside. The mish-mash of regional connected power plants has no current incentive to update with new smart grid technologies since it does nothing to increase their upside. In oder to rapidly develop a smart grid, Obama’s administration will have to throw big money at the project (Gore advises $400 billion over 10 years), and exercise eminent domain to create the interstate energy backbone that the new grid would require. Even environmentalists object on the grounds that regional wildlife and landscape will be disrupted.
Can Obama overcome all of these obstacles? He can if enough people realize the absolute necessity for an overhaul of the current grid system. At this point in the game, with financial markets crumbling under short-sighted greed-happy mismanagement, long-term investment in the future must become a priority.
Theories That Claim the Sky is Falling: Doom Science 101
Well, here’s some fun thinking!! It’s certainly new and sparkly, but not in the least bit cheerful. Welcome to the terrordome of environmental science. Today’s post discusses three well-researched and peer-reviewed theories that claim civil society as we know it is doomed to end: Peak Oil Theory, the Olduvai Theory, and a third theory that lacks an official name, but spells out environmental degradation as a mean culprit in the demise of humanity. Sure you’re ready for this? Quick! grab a beer! (Be sure to read my earlier post, Surviving the Economic Downturn, for tips!)
First, a brief summary. All of these theories present a less-than-pleasant view of a problem called “overshoot.” This term is defined by the difference between the population of the earth (our environment) and our environment’s “carrying capacity,” the ability to provide all of the resources that we require to survive.
Peak Oil
If you’re into Armageddon and that sort of thing, check out the website Life After the Oil Crash for a really good time. The intro to the site begins, “Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.” Righty-o!! The site goes on to explain their heavily researched prediction that our oil-dependent society will degrade into chaos with a decrease in oil production, worsening over time:
Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up.
In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world’s population in 2030 will be both much larger (approximately twice) and much more industrialized (oil-dependent) than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil dependent economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.
Peak Oil adherents do not see any new energy technologies on the horizon that could avert the oil shortage. In my *vast* internet research (cough, cough), I came across very few arguments against peak oil. I did find one:
…like believers undaunted by the failure of alien spaceships to take them to Mars on the date predicted, Peak enthusiasts keep moving the date of the oil apocalypse further into the future. In the new, revisionist models of Hubbert’s prediction, the high point in the curve of discoverable oil on our planet will come in a decade or so. Though we have a reprieve, goes the new theory, still, we’re running out of crude, dude! There’s only another twenty years left in proven reserves! Oh, my! “It’s true that there’s only twenty years’ supply left—and that’s been true for the last hundred years,” Lewis Lapham told me … Lapham of Harper’s magazine is the only editor in the hemisphere with hard knowledge of the petroleum market, insight he inherited legitimately: His family helped found Mobil Oil, the back half of what is now Exxon Mobil.
He asked, “Why in the world would oil companies, or any company, announce that there’s lots of its product out there? You’d bust your own market. It’s better to say the cupboard’s bare.” As Lapham noted, we have been “running out of oil” since the days we drained it from whales. OPEC’s big headache before the war shut down Iraq’s fields was that there was way too much oil. We were swimming in it and oil prices stayed low.”
The Olduvai Theory
The Olduvai theory is slightly more broad-reaching than Peak Oil. Its author, Richard C. Duncan, another serious lover of bell curves explains it thus:
The Olduvai theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production and population. It states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030. After more than a century of strong growth — energy production per capita peaked in 1979. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. Moreover, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years. This analysis predicts that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an “epidemic” of permanent blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks — worldwide.
This, as you would guess, leads to ever increasing shortages of all other goods and services and the subsequent decline of civil society, yada, yada, anarchy, the end. For a detailed look at the stages of collapse, one can read the imminently practical paper called the Five Stages of Collapse written by a Russian named Dmitri Orlov who watched the Soviet Union collapse and draws parallels between the USSR of the 80s and the US today. He says:
The US is an oil importer, burning up 25% of the world’s production, and importing over two-thirds of that. Back in mid-90s, when I first started trying to guess the timing of the US collapse, the arrival of the global peak in oil production was scheduled for around the turn of the century. It turned out that the estimate was off by almost a decade, but that is actually fairly accurate as far as such big predictions go. So here it is the high price of oil that is putting the brakes on further debt expansion. As higher oil prices trigger a recession, the economy starts shrinking, and a shrinking economy cannot sustain an ever-expanding level of debt. At some point the ability to finance oil imports will be lost, and that will be the tipping point, after which nothing will ever be the same.
According to Orlov, we’ve already reached the first of the five stages: financial collapse. Yikes, hard to argue with that one.
Environmental Degradation
Moving on to our third theory, the widely espoused argument that environmental degradation in general will be our downfall. From yet another happy place to visit, dieoff.org:
Today, many people who are concerned about overpopulation and environmental degradation believe that human actions can avert catastrophe. The prevailing view holds that a stable population that does not tax the environment’s “carrying capacity” would be sustainable indefinitely, and that this state of equilibrium can be achieved through a combination of birth control, conservation, and reliance on “renewable” resources. Unfortunately, worldwide implementation of a rigorous program of birth control is politically impossible. Conservation is futile as long as population continues to rise.
So, these theories are pretty extreme. Are they TRUE?? Well, that remains to be seen, but they are instructive. They remind us to be humble, to understand that life is fragile, and to tread lightly on the earth. Environmental activism has taken hold for a reason. We do understand that our consumption mentality cannot be sustained, and we do know that energy independence and sustainability are urgent and required for many reasons. Duh pookie is big on population control, here in the US and overseas. I might even go so far as to say that religion is the root problem today, not for its best contributions (love, humility, charity), but for its worst: regionalism, sectarianism, closed-minded thinking, persecution of those who differ in belief, and an adherence to archaic rules, like no birth control, that are impractical and unwise in our present-day civilization.
It seems pretty clear to me: less people, more stuff to share, less strife.
The next installment in the series explores alternative energy approaches and the realities facing the Obama administration.
Peak Oil and the Grid
The next few posts will be a series exploring the concepts of Peak Oil, Smart Grids, Obama’s infrastructure plans, and the possible future(s) of energy and power use.
If you’ve never come across the concept of Peak Oil, now’s your chance to read up. Peak Oil theory is built upon the simple and obvious fact that petroleum resources are finite. Here are a few statistics:
- Oil currently accounts for about 43% of the world’s total fuel consumption [PDF], and 95% of global energy used for transportation.
- For every one joule of food consumed in the United States, around 10 joules of fossil fuel energy have been used to produce it.
- Of the 65 largest oil producing countries in the world, up to 54 have passed their peak of production and are now in decline, including the USA in 1970/1, Indonesia in 1997, Australia in 2000, the North Sea in 2001, and Mexico in 2004.
- Global oil output could peak by 2020 – much earlier than expected – amid a collapse in investment due to the financial crisis, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) chief economist Fatih Birol claimed.
So that’s your two minute Peak Oil Primer. There is no universal consensus about when oil production will peak. There does seem to be fairly universal agreement that it eventually will. Combine this fact with Global Warming theory, and your looking at a recipe for catastrophic failure if we don’t seek solutions — soon.
So, energy independence and alternative energy sources are getting lots of focus these days. When looking for solutions to the Peak Oil/Global Warming problem, logic dictates that we develop a range of alternative sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal.
But here’s where we hit a wall: our decrepit electrical grid. According to a blogger at MSN Money referring to a US Department of Energy report:
America’s total annual electricity bill is $250 billion. That’s about half what it spends on oil. There are more than 3100 electric utilities in the U.S. — 200 of them publicly traded, 2000 state run and 900 cooperative. The current electricity grid is frequently compared to a Ford Model T: While China and Europe have modernized their entire infrastructure in recent years, the US continues to do emergency repairs on a spluttering side-valve, 20-horsepower engine that breaks down with startling regularity…
The embarrassing fact about electricity is that 60% of it comes from coal — which is dirtier than oil. Some analysts claim that electric cars will actually increase global warming. But the reason we’re so dependent on coal is because of the inflexibility of our electricity grid.”
Our grid system is antiquated, fragile, inefficient, and worst of all, uni-directional, i.e. it cannot handle the intake or upload of generated electricity from outside sources.
Enter Obama. According to SmartGridNews:
We expect the Obama Administration to announce two things that will converge to give this already growing sector an additional boost. The first is a Clean Energy program to stimulate five million new jobs. The second is a “New Deal” stimulus package based on rejuvenating essential infrastructure.
In both case, the Smart Grid will be a centerpiece. We cannot achieve clean energy without a Smart Grid to transport it where needed. And we are increasingly reliant on the electric power system as the critical infrastructure that makes our way of life—and our global competitiveness—possible.
So we just might be in luck if Obama really can rally a New Deal effort to restructure the grid
using Smart Grid technology. Proponents like T. Boone Pickens and, of course, Al Gore are pushing to elevate the discussion. The nonprofit organization Repower America has committed to developing a plan for renewable energy production within 10 years. They’re looking for new members if you’re interested.
Next installment: The theories that claim it’s too late, we’re already past the point of no return…
How Terrorists Will Help Usher in World Government
When I was studying Political Science back in college, one of my interests was world government. I was convinced that with the right global governing body, we could end war and begin to evolve into the peaceful collection of peoples we were meant to be. (Remember those idealistic twenties?) The United Nations was cool, but no teeth. It was just a blustering set of diplomats passing resolutions with no sting. Worse, the United States had always been reluctant to adhere to the rulings and reluctant to fully participate as a mere peer of third world or small, weak nations. But the United States requires more and more cooperation these days from those same weak countries we used to disdain.
Can you say China? China was the poor, second-world behemoth who’s peasant population would never drag its sorry butt into the 21st century. Now, according to a recent article in the International Herald Tribune,
Resolving almost any international problem now – from reducing North Korea’s potential nuclear threat to slowing global warming – requires Beijing’s cooperation. The financial crisis also underscores China’s importance: Its $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves will be indispensable in helping to avert a global economic meltdown.
And even more significantly, how about Pakistan? Back in 2003, we paid Pakistan $3 billion in aid (plus a billion $ in canceled debt, oh yeah, we can afford that!) for the privilege of hunting terrorists there. But times are changing. Chavez and all those pesky second and third world countries are standing up to the US like never before.
Guess what? We have been humbled. Terrorism by definition is stateless. It exists in more countries than we can afford to pay off. It will take an incredible amount of international cooperation to keep Islamic radicalism in check in all the places it exists due to poverty, ignorance, or the US predilection for stamping all over other countries and cultures. The United States needs world government. We all need world government. Imagine the massive tax relief if we weren’t paying for all that “aid” and the massive military we require to prove our point that capitalism and democracy lead to nirvana (haha! Now that’s just funny). Global warming, financial meltdown, or terrorism. All will require binding international law that only a global body can produce.
Satan Becoming More Famous Every Day
Sometimes Satan gets such a bad rap you almost feel sorry for the guy. Well, not today! Today Satan is befriended by not one, but TWO religions. Yup, you guessed it: Islam and Christianity.
In Iran, 49 new criminals have been fined or detained for sporting “satanic” Western-styled hair or clothing:
Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country,” Rahmani said. “The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life,” he added.
But leave it to the Americans to really make Satan work for them:
A campaign debuting Wednesday will use the devil to pitch the rebranding of a New York religous cable service, The Prayer Channel, into NET (New Evangelism Television). … “The Church has used the good vs. evil conflict to promote religion for two centuries,” he added. “In our campaign, the Devil urges viewers to avoid good TV and stick with ‘crappy, pointless, bad television,’ said Ad Agency parnter Michael Migliozzi in announcing the new campaign.
With two efforts so closely aligned you wonder why all these guys don’t get along better! But let’s be fair. We can’t leave out the Jews! Unfortunately, Jews do not seem to call on Satan very often. They have, however, been cooking up schemes to attack Iran, with or without the cooperation of the United States. That’s sort of satanic, I think, maybe? But how cool is this? It seems that Bush, et al, have done some things right after all. According to the Jerusalem Post:
Several news reports have claimed recently that US President George W. Bush has refused to give Israel a green light for an attack on Iranian facilities. One such report, published in September in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, claimed that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert requested a green light to attack Iran in May but was refused by Bush.
If we’re very careful, wear the right body-concealing clothing to hide our shameful bodies, try not to attack other countries, and watch the *right* evangelist TV show, we can all just say no to Satan no matter how big a celebrity he becomes.
It’s Foggy Today
I’m completely tired of politics lately. Obama won. Yay! And now, since he’s the president, I think I’ll let him worry about the economy and international crazy people. It’s foggy where I live. Big, thick fog that makes you feel like your life is a story. Or a black and white movie, but without the zombies. Fog is primordial and undefined. So nice compared to the crisp exactness of most days. I love Lynda Barry, too. Here’s a comic from Salon.com:
I hope wherever you live there’s plenty of uncertainty.
Peace!
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