February 7, 2010

On a windless night, where will the power come from?

Essentially, the earth’s energy comes from sunlight. For the past century, we’ve used mainly fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas — which are, in effect, frozen sunlight, sunlight that was initially captured by plants and animals and compressed into hydrocarbons over aeons of time. But we’ve used most of the readily-accessible fossil fuel deposits, and we’re wrecking the atmosphere by burning them.

All right: instead of using ancient sunlight, let’s harness today’s sunlight, which comes both directly and also in the form of moving air and water — wind, tide and wave. Capture it with windmills, photovoltaic panels, tidal turbines. Non-polluting, powerful and free. Great.

Well, yes, this is the future. But what happens when the air is still, the tide is slack, the sun is hidden — and everyone is still using their lights and appliances? There are only two solutions: find a way to store energy and release it when needed, or retain some form of back-up power generation.

We don’t yet have a way of storing power on a large scale. We have lots of ideas — fuel cells, molten salts and so forth — but they’re not here yet. In Cape Breton, Luciano Lisi proposes to use wind power to pump water up into a dammed valley, and then generate electricity as it flows back down. That’s “pumped storage,” and it works fine in Wales. But the Mi’kmaq are not happy about flooding the valley, and the scale is still pretty small.

The result of the storage conundrum is that in Europe, where wind and solar power are much farther along than here, the old generating stations are still operating. Renewables are wonderful — but without storage they only supplement fossil fuels.

That’s why the renowed scientist James Lovelock strongly supports nuclear energy. Its potential for damage, he argues, is hugely over-rated — and fossil fuel effluents in the atmosphere are far more lethal than any risk from nuclear power. If he could replace all the coal and oil generating plants with nuclear ones, he’d do it instantly.

The thought makes me gag — but in fairness, my opposition to nuclear power is 30 years old, and the industry’s safety record over the intervening decades has been much better than I expected. And, as Lovelock says, if renewables can’t provide a huge and constant supply of energy — and do it right now — and if you’re going to sustain an energy-intensive civilization like ours, what choices do you have?

I would never bet against Jim Lovelock — but I would argue that the first things to do are the obvious things. The energy choice that has no downside, and that can be implemented immediately, is simply to use much less energy. We haven’t begun to get serious about that.

Consider electricity. It ’s possible to power your life entirely with renewables — but not in an energy-hogging house. Cruising sailboats manage very well with wind generators, solar panels and husky batteries, and some people contrive to live that way ashore. In New Mexico, architect Michael Reynolds builds “Earthships,” innovative homes that need almost no power.

The key is reducing demand. But we have no incentive to conserve, because electricity pricing is upside down. The first kilowatts you buy are the most expensive, and the unit price drops as your usage increases. That’s nutty. The first kilowatts should be cheap, to ensure that everyone can afford the electrical basics, but energy gluttons should pay more and more. Penalize wastefulness, not thrift.

A similar policy would hike taxes on gasoline while investing heavily in cheap and efficient public transit. We could boost the price of heating oil, and subsidize the cost of such alternatives as passive solar and geothermal systems — and insulation, as we do right now.

If we want a habitable planet, and we don’t want to be forced into nuclear power, our first priority should be to get our demand back down. We can still live very well. We weren’t exactly living in caves in the 1950s, but our energy use then was just one-third of what it is now. Our real problem isn’t power generation. Our problem is vision and will.

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